


Bigger the vault, greener the grass.

by heonbby



Category: Monsta X (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Hackers, Alternate Universe - Thieves, M/M, Russian Mafia, bamf changkyun, hyungwon the driver, hyunwoo is their boss, jookyun fitting my agenda of sexy grand romance, jookyun hackers, kihyun the sniper, major character death but not really, minhyuk explosive genius, stupid codenames, they rob a bank, they're dumb smart boys, wonho is a safe cracker
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-04
Updated: 2021-03-04
Packaged: 2021-03-17 15:47:28
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 25,561
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29843784
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/heonbby/pseuds/heonbby
Summary: From the inside a bottle of soju and a glass of vodka.
Relationships: Brief Jooheon/OMC, Im Changkyun | I.M/Lee Jooheon
Comments: 2
Kudos: 6





	Bigger the vault, greener the grass.

**Author's Note:**

> i fully started writing this as a joke, the picture in my head is totally diffrent from what i wrote but oh well i kinda of like it? it took more on a serioous route instead of this just one chapter of them being silly ass thieves.  
> i also need to say that i was this close of naming this shooby doo bop because that's how my humor is, yes i will reference things no one remenbers and completly laugh my ass off, do me a favor and search for computer love by zapp.  
> so, english isnt my first languege and i have very small brain energy, shoot me a comment if you see any mistakes or idk if you have something nice to say, i'll appreciate  
> i've been on a long break from kpop and fandom life (anxiety and other crap) but i just love them so much and i needed to indulge myself inn jooheon ships content  
> if you wanna talk to me you can send me a dm on twitter @94jkh i'm not active but i will message you back because i do like to chat. 
> 
> enjoy!!

BIGGER THE VAULT GREENER THE GRASS.

PART ONE – OF SANDY BEACHES AND A GUY NAMED SUE.

ACT 1

_“Giddy with delights seeing what’s to come; the image of the dead, dead ends in my mind. Policeman swear to god; Love’s seeping from the guns; I know my friends and I would probably turn and run; if you get out of bed come find us heading for the bridge; Bring a stone; All my rage; My little dark age.”_

Hyunwoo stands at the end of the long metal table and for a filthy rich guy he looks regular, a bit nerdy but regular. He waits for Tom and Jerry to shut up while putting away the marker he used to scribble his plans on the white board.

Behind his boss Jooheon can see a simple map of the bank’s back, front and side streets, not as detailed as the map spread on the table but he guesses Hyunwoo’s still had some professor in him from his vanilla life. 

The man claps his hands and the sound echoes through the empty floor, eyebrows drawn together in raw disapprove, “C’mon _kiddos_ , we’re about to make business here,” he says very matter of fact, hands coming to rest on the table and bear his weigh as he leans in on the cool surface. His muscular arms bulge in the flimsy black t-shirt he’s wearing.

 _Tom and Jerry_ stop the blabbering and the silence that precedes is short lived but better than the kinky talk from the couple of idiots sitting on the other side of the table.

“Ok listen, quick job, in and out,” the boss says. He makes sure everyone’s paying attention when he rises up and goes to the scribbled board behind him, “We’re scoring a transportation car tomorrow boys.”

The guy in front of him smiles a bit and the short one to his right mumbles something that sounds like “ok now we’re talking,” _yeah, tell me about it._ Jooheon’s at least happy he’ll be making some good money out of his last job.

“How much are we talking boss?” the skinny, tall guy asks, buggy eyes open and clearer than they were a few minutes ago. The burning two questions in Jooheon’s head are is the guy high? And where the fuck does he knows him from? His face is oddly familiar and Jooheon stares a bit, until Hyunwoo is throwing a rough number on them and cutting the deal in equal parts.

“Now, let’s introduce the gang first, shall we?” Hyunwoo points and goes around, “Sue our driver and his boy-toy Julian on the explosives.” The couple giggles. Julian waves and gets comfortable on Sue’s chest.

Jooheon had heard about them and the huge mess they made up north. Exploded a bank, crossed the border, exploded the border and vanished. Sue, the skinny tall one with shaggy hair is a damn good driver. The rumor is his dad was a pro. Just by looking at him, with his painted black nails and stoned face you would guess tired arts major kid that models on the side, and his boy-toy, Julian? Had a name for himself too and it was big, he could bring anything down if he wanted. A hell of a couple.

“Mako, our gun man,” the guy, the short one sitting by Jooheon’s side nods but doesn’t go much further, his face drawn completely blank as he goes back to looking at his nails, waiting for the bit to end and the plan to be explained. Jooheon could sympathize with that.

Mako is known too, excellent sniper. You could get him to do about any job involving a gun if you had the enough amount of money. Trained by the military and gone astray a few years later. No one knows the reason, not that anyone in the business care anyway.

Jooheon wonders why so many known names for a small in and out job. Hyunwoo is cooking something up his sleeve and it’s clear as he introduces the burly muscular guy, Weenie the safer cracker just about everyone in the business knows of.

“And that’s Honey, our hacker.”

“Honey?” Sue asks, bemused. Everyone in the table is looking at him and at the same time and it does little to make him anything but neutral. Jooheon can’t care enough so he just shrugs.

This is his last job. In 24 hours he’ll be on a plane half across the ocean with a bag full of money, sandy beaches and margaritas waiting for him on the other side of the globe.

“Never heard of him,” Julian chips in. His eyebrow arched up, there’s curiosity in his eyes and something else that looks a lot look suspicion. In his boyfriend’s face there’s an eerily similar expression.

_Just what are these two idiots?_

“That’s the point dumbass,” Mako jabs it, as if the small talk actually pains him. He leans forward, elbows on the table and waits for Hyunwoo to continue.

“Honey here was the one behind the president exposé last year, gentlemen. Do you really think I have amateurs as my associates? C’mon now,” His boss says, more for his own benefit than Jooheon’s.

Hyunwoo looks at him, his long time _friend_ gives him a nod of acknowledgement but Jooheon can’t really feel anything warm in there.

The man looks like the shell of something he once was and it scares Jooheon that it doesn’t really bother him anymore; maybe he’s becoming more like him by the day. The lack of warmth doesn’t even tickle him funny, it rather calms his nerves because the only thing left is loyalty and that’s the only thing Jooheon needs.

He’s been doing this since he was a naïve, young-faced Jooheon, 6 years is more than enough to realize the only solid thing between them, outlaws, thieves and just about any variation of it, is loyalty deeply embed in a favor for another. I save your life today, you save my life tomorrow, question of honor.

Friendship is bullshit in this life, doesn’t serve of jack-shit. Jooheon wasn’t good with it in his vanilla life and he’s worst here because you’re a fool if you trust a thief.

“Why?” Weenie asks generally in Jooheon’s direction. The guy is big, easily twice as large as Jooheon but is all muscle. He’s even bigger than Hyunwoo, but somehow he looks sweeter than everyone in the room. Nice smile and round cheeks on his face makes hard to connect the face with the body.

Jooheon grunts “uh?” more to know if it’s directed at him than to know what the man is talking about.

“The president, man, why?” he clarifies.

All eyes are once again on him and by now this is getting old. Jooheon shrugs again, picked up habit, not much of a talker he replies in one breath “Didn’t like the guy,” before turning his gaze to Hyunwoo, who waited to explain the job.

Easy job, easier said than done but easy. Three guys in, two out, they had 4 minutes after Jooheon disarmed the alarm.

Hyunwoo gave them general information, 11 cameras, 5 staff members and 1 armed guard, at least 2 functioning tables and a half a dozen of clients at maximum at that time of day.

Scape routs and blind spots where also discussed. Sue asked for the car to be normal enough to blend in traffic, heavy enough to throw cars off the way if needed and small enough to maneuver.

_Good luck with that._

Mako’s job was to keep everyone under watch while Julian and Weenie worked at it, which should be fairly quick with the lot being ready for transportation.

Transportation was schedule for 4pm, they should be pulling up at the same time they hit the road. Other two armed guards avoided.

“Any questions?” Hyunwoo asks; the whole plan on the table now.

“My bike?” Jooheon remembers the man and Hyunwoo points at him and then at the map as if he’s just remembering now. An act, Jooheon knows the man didn’t forget, was merely waiting for him to ask.

His finger lands at the back street of the bank and Jooheon finally understands why Honey is written in blue there, “Here, parked and ready to go. Sue will change cars here too.”

“We’re changing car twice?” The driver asks and Hyunwoo nods. “Why?”

“Why? You want to flee in a minivan?” Hyunwoo answers as if it’s obvious.

Apparently Sue doesn’t. He nods in understand, grin on his handsome face. Jooheon is sure he knows him from somewhere but can’t quite place it.

“I’ll be expecting you guys tomorrow at two. Mako, come. I’ll show you my toys.”

Jooheon cringes. Guns, they’re guns. The heavy suggestion makes Julian giggle, again, and for the first time since they got here Mako, the sniper, makes an expression other than sheer indifference and apathy. Half grin complementing his lean face as he spins on the plastic chair and follows Hyunwoo out of the room.

Weenie is the first one to get up, stretching his muscly arms above his head and adjusting the waist of his dark jeans on his hips before nodding to them. Time to go, the three of them get the hint and start to move too, Jooheon right behind, Thelma and Louise a few steps slower.

Judging by the pace of everyone no one’s really concerned our nervous for tomorrow, they get to the industrial elevator in silence, almost sluggish. That’s good, no chances of screwing it up when they’re comfortable enough to trust their skills.

The door closes with a heavy screeching noise, Weenie mumbles something under his breath and Jooheon would do the same if he wasn’t already used with the old machine making horrifying noises when going down.

Sue and Julian can’t seem to step away from each other and the other two promptly ignores that their driver for tomorrow has his hands inside their explosives genius pants thoroughly kneading the flesh of his ass.

Not awkward at all.

“Seriously, guys?” Weenie says, the poor guy is ready to bolt out of the metal box when it beeps open, it rattles when it finally stops. Jooheon follows.

The keys in his pocket clatter together and he tunes in on that. The parking lot of the warehouse is empty aside from the few cars parked there, either Hyunwoo’s or from one of his associates. Their footsteps echoes and hit the walls just as Weenie pushes the door open with a thud and toned arms. The man slow his pace and looks back for a second. A second too long.

“Uh, Honey, right? Can I ask you something?” he hesitantly asks, hands shoved deep inside the pockets of his jacket.

Jooheon ponders for a second, goes back and forth between saying a flat out no and making up an excuse. He really doesn’t want to do this right now.

Weenie notices it, “Hey, it’s just I hear you’re really good right?” he quickly explains it, hands up as if swearing innocence. He has a no nonsense look on his face, half expectant and half cold. Well, as cold as he could muster, Jooheon thinks. The man has natural warmth to his face, eyes far way too kind for any one in that line of business.

“Yeah, I’m good,” Jooheon says from his spot. He waits as he fishes the keys from his pocket and from the shifting Weenie makes, leaning and heisting Jooheon can kind of get the gist of it. “Why, you need a favor?”

“Yeah,” the guy finally sets in one position, eyes pleading now. “I’ve been looking for someone.”

“Aren’t we all,” Sue jokes from behind them. Lips more swollen than the stung bee state they were before. Julian’s in a similar post make out fashion.

Jooheon makes a show of rolling his eyes and the couple giggles waving their good byes, a few steps away from them a steel blue jeep beeps and they don’t have to wait long for the car to drive away. Sue honks once and twice before turning the corner.

“So, revenge?”

“What?” Weenie asks, apparently losing the stem of their conversation. It takes a few seconds for him to shake his head, putting his hand back in his pockets. They begin to walk side by side. “Nah man. Family.”

Well, Jooheon could work with that.

“Give me a name, big boy.”

He pulls out a paper, small and folded in more parts than needed. It’s worn on the sides and warm, as if he was holing it in his hands all this time. Jooheon actually feels bad for the guy.

 _Shin Minji, March 1, 1993. Gunpo, South Korea,_ it reads.

“She’s uh,” he stutters. “She’s my sister,” it comes out with a hitched breath. Weenie doesn’t look back, the sun is settling, his eyes trained to look the orange sky.

“I’ll see what I can do for you,” Jooheon mutters. He pats Weenie on the shoulder and gives in a nod. He can understand the feeling.

“I owe you, man.”

“Yeah, you do.”

ACT 2

“Johnny Clash, Sue? Really?” the song stinks. A few minutes ago, when they picked him up he heard Mako calling Sue out for it “C’mon, you fucking my mood up.”

When they park in front of the bank Jooheon feels like it’s his time, taking a good look at the guy sitting beside him. Sue stupidly taps at the wheel following the music, Julian cackles in the back seat and Mako puffs a big sigh, exhausted. The sniper looks just about done with every single one of their asses. Weenie is more lenient, quietly watching them from his seat.

“What can I say? I like the classics.”

Jooheon is typing away. He shakes his head because the music is straight up just tacky as Sue. Sue _. Oh don’t tell me, he didn’t._ “A boy named Sue? Really?”

The driver laughs, Julian too and Jooheon can’t help himself. If Jooheon had never heard of them and Hyunwoo brought them out without any explanation, Jooheon would be out by now. No doing job with goofy idiots.

“What, you thought Sue’s really my name?” he laughs some, easy and bubbly. Jooheon takes another good look at him, he knows everyone in the van is using code names but he can’t imagine how any other name would suit Sue if not Sue. “It’s better than Weenie, don’t yah think?” he teases.

“Shut up.” Weenie quickly tells him from the back. He mumbles something that comes close to “What kinda name is Sue anyway?” and Jooheon’s pretty sure by now, mumbling is a habit of his.

“Why Honey?” Sue’s asks quietly as Julian goes on a tangent about Sue’s name, something about first loves, sweet sixteen and summer rain, too mellow for a group of thieves about to rob a bank.

“Someone gave it to me,” Jooheon says, sheepishly warm. He doesn’t explain it further, instead he goes back to the screen of his laptop and the window is showing that the program he built is about to complete the decoding of the security system.

“Girlfriend?” Sue’s still taping his fingers but his attention is on Jooheon now.

For the first time Jooheon feel squeamish under the look of someone after a long time. His heart skips a beat and then two but he controls his breathing, face blank. It feels funny, the giddy of the feeling, the hating and the missing of the one person who used to make him feel like that effortlessly.

“Boyfriend,” he murmurs. Jooheon doesn’t look up to see the look of surprise in Sue’s face, he doesn’t need to, but he misses the small half smile Sue gives him, knowing in some sort of way. “Ex-boyfriend.” Jooheon corrects himself, tongue less tied, still focused into upping codes, a little bit more and he’s in. With time to spare.

Sue takes a sip of the giant cup of blue Slurpee he totally forgot up till now. The sound falls between them, Julian is still blabbering on the back seat, Weenie is slouched forward, head resting on the back of the driver’s seat so he can see him and Mako is about to pop a vein, stuck in the middle and picking up on all their conversations, none of which is about the bank they’re 3 minutes away from robbing. “Well, it’s his loss,” Sue reassures.

Jooheon snorts lightly, he wishes it was. The bastard is probably chuckling away from wherever he is. “Mine,” he simply says. The security system code page open for him and he’s in. “He’s dead.”

The car goes cold, silent. Dumb Sue chokes on a particularly big chunk of ice, or the surprise of the words. No one says a thing, every single one of them twitching with the sudden mood souring bomb, the air thick like a blanket all around them. They shift and retreat to their own thoughts, Johnny Clash is still singing and besides that, the only other sound is the clinking and scratching of Mako setting up his gun.

Weenie coughs slightly, shoves away the unexpected lump in his throat. “We have a minute, where’re the masks?” he informs eyeing his watch, fumbling with it to click on the timer.

Sue really likes the classic and Jooheon scoffs at the sight of the masks on the glove compartment, he’s so happy he’s not going to wear those stupid things. Nixon, Reagan and Carter are passed back. LJB is forgotten behind and shoved away.

“What the fuck, Sue?” Mako explodes, looks at Reagan face in disbelief. The cheap Halloween mask is terrible, Mako has his gun in one hand and the mask on the other, probably contemplating if he should just kill Sue right there.

Julian sends his boyfriend a kiss, smiley faced.

“What? Patrick Swayze and Keanu Reeves, dude. It’s a classic.”

Mako looks like he wants to complain, but doesn’t have the time to when Jooheon tells them it’s time. Security system and cameras down, all three of them on the back seat are out of the car with guns in hand and masked.

It takes seconds, only time enough to see them going in when Sue is peeling off. At the end of the block they’re turn left and the left again until they’re on the back of the bank.

Jooheon packs his bag, shoving everything inside. The feeling of crossing the finish line, going full circle washes over him. He can finally breathe a breath of air he’s been holding himself out of for years now. As he zips it up and reaches for the helmet at his feet, Jooheon can almost see everything he’s been fighting for his whole life falling on his lap, it tastes bittersweet but he swallows it because it’s rightfully his. _Theirs._ It goes down with a lump, dry and dense but Jooheon had worse.

He allows himself to feel for the first time in 6 years. Really feel, the ugly the bad and the huge, liquid like grief pooling at the pity of his stomach. He can now, because it’s over, the ghost of him can haunt Jooheon freely and Jooheon would let it happen until it consumes the last bit of him, until there’s nothing left but stupid sandy beaches and stupid coconut drinks with little paper, colorful umbrellas. He deserves that too.

“Thanks Honey, pleasure working with ya,” Sue says, sounding a bit too far away for Jooheon to do something other than give him a little grin and mumble “yeah, you’re welcome.”

Sue goes around the ugly, green minivan, offers his hand. He smiles toothless but it reaches his eyes nonetheless, like he mean it.

Jooheon looks at him for a moment. Again. It feels like he has done this a lot because he goes over the little beauty marks the man has just to make sure they’re still there, the tip of his nose, on his bottom lip. “Sue, have we met each other before?”

“Are you flirting with me, Honey?” Sue says, smile getting bigger and making him look less like a perfectly carved sculpture and more like a young, innocent kid who just haven’t realized how beautiful they are. Both states of him makes Jooheon ache for some reason, the feeling of knowing but not remembering, hollow Sue shaped hole in the memories he doesn’t have.

“No, idiot, you just seem familiar but I can’t quite place you still.”

The driver smirks at him. Then a laugh seems to bubble from deep inside his belly, coming up freely and shaking the man’s frame. It sounds punched out of him, like he didn’t expect it and it surprised him. “Probably from porn.”

Jooheon’s brain fails to make the connection for a good couple of seconds, if feels suspended in thick molasses, floating and not actually working properly. He goes pale, then red and then bit green. He might vomit all of his breakfast on the curb, precious overpriced coffee.

“Julian and I like to keep it kinky.”

Jooheon groans. Looks at their hand still connected, shakes his head, “you’re a perv,” his lizard brain sings at him. “I can’t believe you guys, seriously?” He actually snorts because obviously, that sounds like them. “It was nice working with you too. Tell Julian I said bye.”

“Sure, Honey.”

He hops on the bike waiting for him. The sleek, black gsx-r750 has the key on the ignition. It dips under his weigh, nice and smooth. He might hate Hyunwoo but the bastard knows him, the bike feels sturdy and reliable between his thighs. Uh, the joke isn’t funny, nor is his ex-boss but he snorts all the same.

Açai and banana smoothies, he reminds himself, far, far away from here.

The world trembles and for seconds at a time it goes completely mute until the next round of shoots comes blazing in their direction. Maybe not, after all.

Jooheon needs a minute to understand what the hell is going on. The sun shines on him with caring pity, almost a gentle as he lies on the asphalt to watch the scene unfold before his eyes.

He can feel warm liquid going down his pants, soaking through the fabric of his jeans, for a moment he wonders if he peed himself. No, apparently not. Jooheon reaches for it and the tips of his fingers come back stained with red, vicious and metallic smelling blood. Fortunately it doesn’t hurt, maybe he’s dead.

Laughing in disbelief he thinks of the suitcases full of money he stuffed inside the small plane he’s supposed to be getting on in an hour. He’s going to die and leave it all behind for someone else like the unlucky fool that he is.

That’s it, he thinks looking blindly at the sun and the blue sky. He was cursed from the beginning wasn’t he? He scowls at the never ending blue above him, hoping God would see just how pissed he is. Not fair, man, c’mon. He never had a chance, every choice he made, all a fluke leading up to this.

All those years ago it was supposed to be him, the idea that every so often would float inside his head now settles, heavy like cement. He was walking on borrowed time. Death is finally catching up to him and he can’t move, or protest.

Jooheon lays there and waits, heavy chested, warm sunlight above him and the sound of Mako’s gun shooting at two police cars poorly parked at the end of street in his ears.

Ten seconds later feels more like ten minutes, his head swings to the side, wobbles. His bike is under the police car that smashed into him, the police officer in the front seat is dead, an open bullet wound between his open eyes. Jooheon cringes. Poor guy was getting a closed casket.

Was it Mako? Sounds like it, but Sue was closer.

Twenty seconds later Jooheon frowns, he’s still alive. From his anatomy classes and the amount of blood pooling around his legs he knows he should be dead cold by now. Maybe he’s a ghost already.

“Get the fuck up, Honey. What the hell dude.” Weenie, Jooheon thinks, screams at him, gun in hand and running towards him.

Weenie stops mid stroll, hides behind the open door of the police car and starts shooting. Jooheon can see now, how his face perfectly matches his body. All the sweetness and the softness hardened into stone cold precision and leashed fury. He looks back as he finishes shooting the whole pent in the police barricade and Jooheon thinks he looks like a damn super hero. Except he’s a thief and he’s coming full force in his direction, money bag full and thumping against his hip, arm stretched behind him while he keeps shooting the new load of bullets aimlessly behind him.

In one swing Jooheon’s chest isn’t so heavy anymore. Weenie pushes his hand out and Jooheon’s up. A bullet lands too close, his pants are dripping, not pee.

“Run, you fucking idiot!” Weenie screams on his face, he cringes again when saliva hits him on the cheek, though, Jooheon can’t seem to do much more than that. Weenie looks at him for a second, that’s all he can afford, glassy unfocused eyes meet his and Weenie slaps Jooheon in the face, hard and quick.

Jooheon’s cheek throbs, the world comes from under water and the muffled sounds aren’t so muffled anymore. They’re so loud and close, so fucking close it sends Jooheon into a frenzy of adrenaline. His brain snaps from the slump it was in and when he ducks down to snatch his bag Jooheon can see the dead officer who bleed all over his pants.

He reaches for the gun on the waist of his jeans and passes it to Weenie. Weenie cheeks it and shrugs before using it behind him, his own gun empty and slung over his shoulder now.

Mako and Julian are behind them. Sue’s honking in front of them, minivan doors open and music blasting.

“C’mon baby, let’s go!” Julian shouts, chuckling.

Julian can’t possibly look more maniac than now but something tells Jooheon that he might. Explosive beeping in Julian’s hands seconds before he throws it in the barricade. The explosion blasts midair, the sound of glass breaking follows.

It’s their way out. They run. All four of them drunk in adrenaline.

Jooheon gets in first, feeling for the laptop in his bag the moment he sits. Julian goes second, shotgun, almost loses his leg when Weenie slams the door behind him. It’s only when Sue’s peeling off that Weenie pulls Mako inside, otherwise the sniper wouldn’t have had the time to get inside. He’s still shooting. It gets Jooheon wondering just how much AMO he had on him.

“Go, go, go!” someone screams. Certainly not Jooheon, but he can’t see because he’s furiously typing, they need a plan, anything that will get them away.

Sue’s slamming his hand on the wheel. He looks like a crackhead, the stoner façade completely wiped. Would you see him and immediately think he just snorted a whole bag of cocaine up his nose. The buzzing energy comes off of him in waves as he drives off. Tires screeching, car shaking and Johnny Clash still playing on the God-damned radio.

They have an adrenaline Junky driving them.

He knows all the routs but the cops behind them do too. Not dead but caught, Jooheon isn’t feeling any luckier.

To be honest, he thinks, he should’ve expected. His last one is the one putting him into jail. Jooheon’s too pretty to go to jail in the States. He feels the mocking laugh inside his head, kissing goodbye to his dreamy island.

Mako’s trying to steady himself and the gun in his lap but it is way harder than it should. He has steady hands but the car is shaking with the way Sue’s cutting ways, nearly hitting the other cars on the highway.

They have four police cars on their tail. Any other time Jooheon would be shaking when the minivan spins on the lane and crosses the road bed to land on the other side, right now though, he barely notices it.

Jooheon can’t see they’re going the other way around but he can guess from the horns and the fact that they’re moving in reverse. He shoves his antenna to Weenie who passes it to Mako who asks “The fuck am I supposed to do with this shit?”

“Internet. Put it up!”

“I swear to God, Honey if I lose my hand,” Mako scowls. Opens the window anyway, the van spins the around again, the right way around. The internet is up, antenna secured on the roof.

“What is your plan, genius?” Julian asks from the front seat. All eyes are on him but Sue’s, thank God, and by now it is old news.

“Don’t have one,” is all Jooheon can muster.

He knows if they want a chance at this they need to disappear and blend in before the helicopter gets here. “The street lights are all going to turn green Sue, think you can manage that?”

Sue, the insufferable junky fucking laughs and slaps the wheel again, “Yeah baby, let’s go.” Dumb Chip ‘n Dale and their matching phrases. He just drives forward, foot buried in the pedal as Jooheon does his job. The code goes up, the streetlights blink green. It’s ride or die. Or get caught.

The whole van trembles. It scrapes into a few cars on the way, barely managing to dodge others. A police car behind them goes nose first into a pickup truck passing through, the first accident of a massive chain reaction. They’re finally slipping away and everyone in the car can breathe.

Everyone but Jooheon.

His laptop blinks and he goes cold, colder than when he thought he was dying. It actually makes him sick.

“Who’s the cheeky fucker?” Julian asks. Eyes outside, he’s pointing, entertained. Everything goes blank in Jooheon’s head but this time he’s painfully aware of it.

He’s definitely dead, he’s sure. All of this is an illusion of his lasts moments on earth. He should’ve known God was going to fuck with him even in his death bed. Let him think he got away when in reality he’s probably still laying in the asphalt and losing his lasts drops of blood. Well played you dick-bag, you can send me to hell now.

The video playing on the LED outdoors is the same one playing on his computer.

Suddenly Jooheon’s warm. So warm he might be running with a fever. Whole body shivering, in a trance; Jumbled of emotions that are way bigger than him. So, so much bigger he thinks he’s about to expand so that everything can fit inside without him exploding in a million tiny little pieces, spilling everything inside of him. Of buzz and anxiety he can’t believe this is reality.

Jooheon knows that face well, like the palm of his hand, the feeling of his own fingers, the taste of his own mouth. Had looked in those caramel eyes for so long, memorized every corner, every crinkle, every twitch. 

How many times he got lost into the infuriating cocky smirk in that face. In those lips and the taste of them. Minty and energy drinks. Jooheon misses it. So bad it has him shaking. Weenie says something but Jooheon can hear, drowning. He’s once again lost in those fucking beautiful eyes.

“Hey y’all,” smart-assed little thing, Changkyun is caught saying on the screen. “I’ve got something for you, enjoy.”

Jooheon deflates and oozes, a defective balloon. The thud sound of pain coming from his mouth is exclusively from his ribcage closing on itself and crushing his heart to dust, as if it was made of crumbly ashes and not from the red strong muscle beating like he’s a warhorse.

“You know the guy, Honey?” Weenie asks again, his voice finally reaching the surface of Jooheon’s mind, hand squeezing Jooheon’s shoulder when he realizes the man beside him is a blink away from hyperventilating.

When Sue shoves the car up the ramp of the parking lot they all jump up. Jooheon starts to pack. Ten seconds later they’re getting out of the exhausted car and getting into the other one waiting for them. Black, windows tinted.

The whole thing take a minute, they’re out in the streets again. Masks, gun, gloves and anything suspicious left behind to explode. Fucking Julian.

“Who was that guy?” someone asks and someone else adds “He really just exposed the CEO of the bank we just robbed?” 

“You know him right, Honey?” Weenie is looking at him, accessing from the front seat. Called shot gun, Mako’s driving. The happy couple is eating each other’s faces in the back seat beside Jooheon.

“Yeah,” Jooheon chokes out. “Yeah, I do.” Because how can he not? Except he’s dead and buried, in a grave Jooheon left flowers in just yesterday. Cried and said goodbye. “Volkov.”

“Boyfriend?” Sue asks, looking like he _knows_.

“No,” Jooheon shakes his head. “Dead boyfriend.”

PART TWO – OF WOLVES AND CURLED TONGUES.

_“Seasons came and changed the time. When I grew up I called him mine, he would always laugh and say, ‘remember when we used to play?’ Bang, bang, I shot you down. Bang, bang, ‘you hit the ground. Bang, bang, that awful sound. I used to shoot you down.”_

He liked listening to people talking in Russian. A pleasure of his, the way the air swish and the tongue curls, the accents grows in ups and downs, forming words, sentences and paragraphs too fast for him to possibly understand. It calms him down, makes him think that perhaps in his past life he was involved with Russia somehow.

It’s silly, but he sits down, wiping cloth perched on his shoulder and piles of dirty dishes in the tray in front of him and listens to the few Russians regulars on the little stuffy restaurant his foster mom owns. Just listens, no need for understanding and his tongue sometimes curls too, his lips in a tiny pout.

The men sitting a couple feet away are all greying or starting to. Jooheon notices the one with blue eyes and darker hair out of the five of them the most. The man sometimes nods at him when coming and going, looks into his eyes and stares back when Jooheon, sweaty from the kitchen, comes to the front to get their orders, serve drinks, clean their tables.

One day he catches a name. His foster mom calls in a cautious tone when she slides out of the kitchen to say hello at their insistence. Mr. Vasiliev. Igor Vasiliev. Ee-gor, Jooheon whispers under his breath while spraying a table and cleaning the greasy surface. Ee-gor, he mouths it.

Igor, he’s the younger one out of the group. Mid-forties, eyes so blue it’s unsettling when the warm yellow, fading lights of the restaurant reflects out of the hard stare. Jooheon can’t help but feel _wrong,_ clammy hands insistently rubbing against the worn out jeans of his pants. The two blue circles didn’t seem to belong in this place. The lights instead of making the room cozy and familiar made it look precarious, cramped and just overall poor as poverty drowned the place like it owned it, every crack and cranny, including the people. The workers, the clients, the owner herself, except for Igor Vasiliev, who stands out like a sore thumb.

Elegant. Always in suits, smoking expansive tobacco and aromatic cigars the man held his posture, from the the way he leaned against the uncomfortable chair as if it wasn’t digging sharply at the lean muscles of his back, or in the way he laughed, reserved but not less true, eyes crunching and hiding between the age marks around the corners.

He would never scrunch up his sleeves like the rest of his peers. Always folding, revealing the extensive, never ending lines of black that went from the knuckles of his fingers, dipped under the folded sleeves of his elbows and up where eyes couldn’t reach, covered in tattoos.

Igor – Ee-gor would sit cross-legged, the bottom of his tailored pants rising and always showing expensive shoes and thin black socks, leaned back smoking a cigar while watching the table. The card game happening, the men, _his_ men getting rowdy, laughing and drinking. Sometimes a tiny smile in his face, sometimes blank, hard, cold stare, sometimes, though rarer, he would join in a game or two – always win, the table unavoidably more contained, the men more tame.

He seemed like the boss and Jooheon liked to listen to him the most and even though he was less of a talker and more of a _glarer,_ he would talk. Low and smooth, a voice that vibrates in the chest and spreads all around, it wasn’t gritty, but had that roughness to it, the easiest to understand stray words from.

The others were a bit older but more aloof in a sense that they let themselves be, at least in this tiny space of Mrs. Chou hole-in-the-wall. Maybe more burly and less kept than Mr. Vasiliev but just as dangerous looking, the shapes of their guns barely concealed behind the thin fabric of their shirts.

Jooheon picked up on their habits too.

The bigger one of them all, strange looking thing, sharp nose and head full of grey hair, liked the big, oval but shallow glass ashtray to be on his side of the table, sometimes he would ask for it in a smooth accent, always said thank you when Jooheon appeared with it from the back room, popping it on the table.

No music on the radio when they were there and Jooheon is curious to know if all Russian gangsters liked that much the sound of their own voices or if this particular group just hated that much the Mandarin old songs Mrs. Chou hums along to when she’s cooking. And cleaning. And doing pretty much anything but when she was praying or reading with her red framed, rectangle glasses perched on her tiny but long nose.

One of the other men, balding and flashy trousers would always ask for a tall cup of iced water first thing before ordering. Cheeks sunken in and age weighting down on him, the man looked straight out of a Tim Burton movie, the lankness of his limbs and the tall stature made it even harder to ignore, but for Jooheon it was the raspy voice and the glassy, blurry eyes, perhaps going blind. But he was nice, polite.

The two other had an uncanny resemblance to them, their orders almost always identical. Almost away the same too, beef lo mein, hot and sour soup and fried wantons.

When they stayed past closing time, usually the whole table serious faced, talking only in Russian, 19 years old, fresh faced Jooheon would sit around, absently polishing glass cups or doodling on the unused napkins and just listen. Tongue curling at some points too, inevitably. He was relaxed and giddy, it made him miss talking in Korean so sometimes when the men were preparing to leave and Jooheon was finishing the clean-up he would catch himself singing old trot songs under his breath, humming, tapping his fingers to the tacky beats inside his head.

On those days Jooheon would lay awake in his tiny-tinny room above the restaurant, looking out of the fenced window past the energy cables and into the dark blue, starless sky. Wondering if maybe missing home would make him feel like he somehow belonged somewhere, like he had roots even if he was yanked from the ground way too soon. Uh, he says to himself, maybe not. Maybe he just doesn’t belong anywhere, lost that way.

Still, he can’t help himself into just _wondering_. Head filled with maybes and what if’s.

What if he missed home? What if he remembered home? Would he use the money he had stashed way and buy himself a ticket back to Korea and flea into the night, never look back at the broke place surrounding him?

Probably not, Mrs. Chou had gotten older and she only had him and that ugly, brown cat. Jooheon knows he could never just leave the old woman behind like that. That he knows.

What if Jooheon asked Mr. Vasiliev to teach him Russian? What if Mr. Vasiliev asked Jooheon to work for him? Would he learn Russian, fill his skin with ink and finally put his only good abilities to use?

Jooheon doesn’t know about the tattoos or his potential fluency in the language, but he knows he’s good at what he does and the bundles of money hidden away in the floor boards prove it.

“Prove it,” in quote marks, because even still, Jooheon couldn’t just break away from poverty. It had him by the ankles. The broken homes, the thin mattresses and the hungry, painful stomach even if shadows, phantom of something it once was, it was all still lurking around. Keeping Jooheon in place, unable to move, conditioned to not want more. Never want more, he was just one of the many failed foster kids in the system, now a young adult with one, finally, good person having his back, he didn’t know how to grab more than his hands could hold, forgetting he had pockets for all of it.

“You’re a good singer, _Malysh_ ,” Mr. Vasiliev says to him. The first time the man talks directly at him. Jooheon is ringing their bill, putting away the cash the man has slid into the counter while looking into the register for the change.

“Uh,” Jooheon mumbles. A deer caught in the head lights, eyes getting bigger as he looks up and sees the man looking back at him. Bluest of eyes, Jooheon can’t talk but he smiles, tiny and dimpled.

Igor smiles at him too, pleased. “Keep the change,” he says tapping on the counter and nodding before going for the door and away. Jooheon watches through the glass windows until he disappears.

He feels slightly odd, the same feeling of not catching a joke or only catching the lasts words of a sentence and being expected to have a coherent answer.

Malysh, he mutters. What does that mean, Uh? For some reason he knows it isn’t a key to understanding why he feels so inadequate under the man’s scrutiny, but _it is something_. Mei-lee-sh. It’s something. It makes Jooheon anticipate for something, like when you’re lost in a conversation and a friend just elbows you and smiles, the don’t worry I’ll tell you later that goes unsaid.

 _It_ creates a certain kind of kinship. Being acknowledged, in that moment it makes them no longer strangers, it opens space for something. Something Jooheon isn’t quite sure of yet.

The old, brown cat jumps on the counter. Now that the place is empty it dares to come out. Its big eyes look up at Jooheon, meowing slowly. Jooheon gives in in a moment of distraction, scratching behind soft, pointy ears without any purpose whatsoever. The cat purrs and Jooheon repeats to himself, malysh, before closing the register and making his way to lock up.

He looks into the dark. The place is barely recognizable with the lights out and empty if not for the lingering smell of Chinese food. Doesn’t matter how many times Jooheon bleaches and cleans the smell apparently has impregnated the walls; Ingrained in the old, wood furniture.

The smell used to really bother Jooheon but not anymore. It’s hardly a thing. When he bends down in the kitchen, close to the cast iron wok, to clean spilled soy sauce he’s familiar with the several scents around him well enough to serve as a surprisingly calming thing. 

He sighs, wrist deep on the murky water of the cleaning bucket he uses to rinse the rag. It’s cool. It almost makes him feel slightly better about the heat coming from the huge industrial pots and pans boiling and heating. The stock smell is good too.

Mrs. Chou comes inside with a dirty mop in her hands. She look for him behind her glasses, pushes them up her head, “we have clients, honey. Go, go!” she urges. Jooheon doesn’t need to take a second look to know which clients she’s referring to. She always has this frown on her face every time the Russian are in, which is a lot of times. He never asked why.

The damp, twisted rag is left behind, perched on the bucket rim as he comes out of the kitchen patting his hands on his apron and fishing the paper pad and pencil he keeps on the front pockets. He might need a new one after today, the thing is falling apart by now, worn out with ears and browning corners from the constant holding of clammy hands. Jooheon sighs for the second time.

He takes a look at the table, stops dead in his tracks. They went from the usual five and the occasional plus one to a table of ten. Three of the tables in the tiny space glued pushed together to make room for everyone.

The third sigh Jooheon lets out is punched out of him, more a wheeze of air coming late of his lungs than a sigh. He catches sight of the young male at the table looking directly at him. Hazel, curious and clean eyes accessing his face carefully. Jooheon’s knees are suddenly weak and he isn’t sure if it’s because they share the same slanted eyes, the typical raven black hair and the knowing look people have when they recognize someone they have thing in common in a scarce place.

It’s the first time Jooheon gets lost in Volkov’s – Changkyun, later he finds, eyes. The new guy Mr. Vasiliev calls his associate when he gives a toast later that night, the whole table drinking a shot of vodka after their boss does.

Someone jokes that they came to celebrate the new partnership in a place Volkov’s familiar with. They mean, _because he’s Asian_ , but it goes unsaid.

The young, maybe younger than Jooheon, man glances at him, knowingly he snorts and Jooheon can’t help but shake his head while he pretends to clean the counter for the third time since he came back from the kitchen with their food.

“I was born in Russia, you know?”

Jooheon listens to the guy talk. He has an accent and Jooheon can’t pick up Russian from it. The way he makes his sentences is clean. He knows what to say and how to say it. How to express himself even if it’s a little hard for the others to understand the way he pieces things together. What he means comes across.

It’s simple and short. He doesn’t dwell much, when asked questions he’s direct, sometimes cheeky, little smirk playing on his handsome face. _Cheeky, little thing_ , Jooheon thinks. His voice is deep, has weight to it. It settles in the air. Makes you listen. Jooheon likes it.

“Hyung, do you have any soju?” Volkov’s asks in Korean. The table turns to look at where Jooheon stands, pad in his hands and his hip leaned against the counter. Other than the full table there are no other clients, the closed sign on, and Mrs. Chou wants him outside, _“take care of the party.”_

“How do you know I’m older?” Jooheon asks back, but in English. Delighted to hear someone else other than himself talking in Korean but a little taken aback from the surprise of it. Jooheon regrets not being as pert as the guy on the other side of the room, but hopes the playful little smile on his lips would do the job.

“Lucky guess,” Volkov winks.

Jooheon snorts, pockets his pad forgetting about the poorly, half drawn brown cat in the lined paper. “Yeah, give me a minute,” Jooheon answers in Korean while he peels himself from the counter to go fetch it.

He almost misses the way Mr. Vasiliev looks at him but the blue gaze makes it impossible. Invisibly pinning him in a totally new way Jooheon stomach drops. The word from two weeks prior pops in his head. Suddenly he’s in the state of waiting for that something again, as if he knows he’s about to understand. 

When he comes back with five green, glass bottles of soju propped in a large tray and places it on the table Igor touches his wrist and asks him to sit down, small smile in his lips much like the one he gave him before. “Mrs. Chou told me you’re good with computers. Is that true, Malysh?” Igor asks when Jooheon makes no room to move and just look at him from where he stretched himself to reach the middle of the table.

He wants to ask what it means, that word, but doesn’t. “Uh,” Jooheon makes that noise again, from his throat, then cleans it and straightens himself up. “Yeah. Yeah, I am. Why?”

Volkov’s looking at him again, with that glint of curiosity as if it had just been renewed. Reaching deeper as he stares straight into Jooheon’s eyes for the few seconds Jooheon looks at him in search for _something._ Where is this going? “Sit down with us,” Igor asks again and this time someone clears a seat, probably ordered silently by Igor.

The chair is warm against his ass. The heat of someone else’s body lingering in the tiny space of time it take for Jooheon to rearrange his tilted apron and sit down. The table is quiet. Jooheon feels odd again, his belly feels funny. Maybe he doesn’t get the joke because he is the joke.

He is out of the blue feeling conscious, fingers fidgeting with the loose threads on the seams of his jeans. Just above the knee, on the inside. It’s the way the two people he’s most aware of at the table are looking at him. Different but similar in a way Jooheon can’t explain. Both analytical in a sense though.

Volkov’s starts pouring soju into everyone’s glasses. He’s polite, uses both hands, bows a little and Jooheon wants to help him just for the sake of it. Because he wants to feel familiar with an action that should be in his day to day life but isn’t. He rather chooses against it. Settles for thanking Volkov’s in Korean, nods back when Volkov’s nods at him.

Similar to Igor, quicker, it reaches Jooheon as a sense of kinship. They share that little thing and they understand it. He isn’t sure about the other man but Jooheon’s certainly keeping it, _the moment_ , he means. Maybe it’ll be useful.

Jooheon thinks it may just be him but since young there’s people he just clicks with and he keep them inside his head for as long as he can remember. Clicks, it’s hard to put words on the feelings swimming inside his chest, the sense of rightness, of pieces falling together, the giddiness of hope. He feels naïve even.

It leads the way he interacts with people. If it will be easy to just be, to just talk, to understand and be understood or if he’s going to have to work for it, to strain a little, shape himself a little bit differently, put effort into making a conversation that instead should flow naturally, happening on its own.

He feels it with both of them, Igor and Volkov, eerily similar but vastly different. They tug at different places to get the same results, the same _something._ Jooheon drinks the soju in one swift motion, prettily and politely, at least someone out there should feel proud of his drinking manners. The grandpa who taught him drinking etiquette when he was only sixteen, before Mrs. Chou, would certainly be. He thinks of him dearly too, the same as Mrs. Chou. They both shape him in the same way.

“Tell us your name,” Mr. Vasiliev asks as Volkov pours him another shot. Something tells Jooheon that the man knows already but wants him to say it.

Jooheon leans against the back of his chair, cooler now. He ponders for a few seconds. One of his what if’s comes back to him, what if Igor offers him a job? What if Jooheon? “Honey,” he says after a beat. “It’s Honey.”

 _Joo-hon_. Joo-honey, that’s how Mrs. Chou calls him. Honey because it’s too hard to pronounce. His English name is boring so he doesn’t mention it very often.

“Jagi?” Volkov chirps in playfully. “Jagiya,” he smiles at Jooheon, tone in banter and for the fourth time that night Jooheon sighs, lighthearted.

“Uh-uh,” Jooheon shakes his head. “Honey. Like the sweet.”

Mr. Vasiliev hums. Under the lights, the blue silken necktie a little loose, a button of his shirt open Jooheon can see the ink in his neck poking through. His sleeves are rolled – as always. From up close Jooheon can see better details, it brings a new appreciation for the art. It looks like a coloring book, a fucking cool one, of black lines and shading, of faces and symbols and letters. “How good are you with computers, Honey?”

Jooheon isn’t sure how he feels listening to his name rolling of the man’s tongue so easily, so coated. It definitely makes him slower, to think, to access his feelings and the way his stomach uncomfortably flips. There’s a hint of awareness that rises up his spine, the same way it does when he used to get lost at places after just moving in. His senses coming up and trying to guide him as best as it could.

“I’m good enough,” is all he says. A few people laugh while others lightly pat him in the shoulder. Igor is entertained. Volkov is back at looking at him curiously, looking torn between digging deeper into the answer or just flat out asking for Jooheon to explain. “Why?”

“Our youngest here is our new tech guy,” Igor explains it, patting Volkov’s shoulder the same they did to him. Friendly, however, like everything that seemed to do with both of them there seems to be something laying unsaid just beneath the surface. “Hacking, are you good at it?”

 _Ah_ , Jooheon thinks. He takes in the whole table, trying to find clues of how much he can share. How much he can say. Jooheon can be analytical too, more, even. Considering the fact that kinship, click, bond and whatnot, he doesn’t trust any of these people. Not because he might get caught, no. Because that’s impossible, there’s no track, no trace, not a single loss thread left behind. But because he might be asked for something he isn’t willing to give. Favors for people he doesn’t know, information he can’t be bothered to provide. Like his real name. “What if I am?”

Mr. Vasiliev takes his time to look at him, from behind his shot glass and leaned back the same way Jooheon he says “If you are I would like to make you an offer.” Cross-legged and confident, chin high Igor was still pleased, the way his lips curled was a tell-tale. But expecting, as if Jooheon was growing on him, “a job.”

“What job?”

“Volkov’s will teach you. Easy thing and I pay well.”

That’s the first time Jooheon looks at him, Volkov – Changkyun, with wondering eyes. Big wondering, waiting eyes. It’s the first time they look into each other’s eyes and they see beyond it. Reading the underlines carefully, calculating quickly their own thoughts and translating into the wat their eyes moved, blinked, the way their expressions twitched, smirked, nodded – Silently communicating.

It’s the second time Jooheon gets lost in that hazel gaze. Second time just that night and Jooheon swears to himself he will never forget the feeling of it. How his brain feels suspended in thick, sweet syrup, how his body is so light he might get blown away from just a particular forceful breath, how he feels under water drowning but at the same time breathing is completely unimportant, he doesn’t need it.

When he lays awake in his room, missing the weight of Volkov’s stare he wonders if that’s how it feels to miss home and he realizes then. He wants to belong _with him_ and that’s where it lays the difference of everything.

Maybe he was naïve then, young and willing, wanting and needing, but now. Now Jooheon’s angry, back to the present it doesn’t make a difference if Changkyun feels like home, that the sight of him makes a punched out sigh come out of his lungs, _oof_ , like he’s in pain.

When he looks at him, from the other side of the echo-y room – what feels like miles between them, Jooheon world collapses in itself and crumbles. For the third time he doesn’t have ground under him and he feels like falling forever and he’ll never reach the bottom. It drives him crazy at the same time it paralyzes him, Jooheon disconnects, dissociates, staggers in place, his wobbly feet having a hard time keeping him up.

It’s stupid because he has so many things at the tip of his tongue – the curl of an accent, the phantom taste of Changkyun’s cherry lipstick and blood from where he bites the inside of his cheek and feel the skin give away. The wound opens as easy as he blinks and he wishes his mouth could do the same, that they could spat all the ugly he feels creeping inside his ribcage from the moment Changkyun showed up on the screen of his laptop. If he swallows it he’ll choke, it’s too much.

“Jagiya?”

Jooheon sobs, deep and hollow. It hurts with the amount of force his body puts into it. He shakes violently, knuckles white from where they are curled tightly on the strap of his bag. “I’m going to fucking kill you,” falls out of his mouth like he’s physically pushing the words out one by one. The outside world, the very visibly watching people around him, the sound of Hyunwoo’s voice, it all ceases to exist.

He closes the distance. Changkyun is watching him, curious, surprised perhaps. He looks in Jooheon’s eyes the same way they’ve always done. Changkyun flinches then, open his mouth before he closes it again, protecting his tongue and teeth from the punch Jooheon lays on him. Straight on the jaw, it sends him tumbling to the floor.

Wide, guilty eyes look up at Jooheon and he wants to go for another, and another, until there’s nothing left inside of him. He feels sick. The bile rising up and burning the back of his throat makes him heave. By the way Changkyun stays on the ground, clenches his fists, closes his eyes and waits Jooheon knows the man would just stay down and take everything – anything, and that very thought sends Jooheon to the ground himself.

His ears are ringing loudly, he can feel the cool of the floor on the palms of his hands, steady, it’s the thing constant right now.

Someone puts their hands on his shoulder and Jooheon let it pull him up. Eyes shut tight he lets himself be embraced by a strong pair of arms. He breathes, chest squeezed so tight he can hear the sound of his lungs trying to work properly – it sound like a holed balloon, wheezing. It’s Hyunwoo. Jooheon recognizes the cologne and concentrates on it. It’s musky and clean, he brings his numb, useless arms up to grip at the man’s waist and he cries in his chest.

No one says a thing. He’s grateful.

That night – back at cramped the restaurant, the air filled with smoke and the smell of alcohol sweeping into his skin, Jooheon says yes. And Volkov – Changkyun, it’s Changkyun, gives him a smile he would never forget. The image of him burned behind his eyelids, messy dark hair from where he kept tugging at and spit-shiny lips.

Something else Jooheon never forgets is the weight of Igor’s body or the way his tattooed hands used to draw invisible patterns on the bone of his hip. The way he used to whispered _dorogoy_ – baby boy, in the shell of his ear so gently, a tickle of warm breath making Jooheon squirm.

Jooheon unraveled him like a present. A thing to be curious of, he understands.

It makes Changkyun, lanky, young and soft Changkyun to cling to him like a dog to its owner. It means teeth in his neck, bruise-y, demanding hands on his hips and breath-taking kisses under the moonlight on the rooftop of the restaurant.

Changkyun calls him _jagi._ Whispers in his ear much the same Igor whispers dorogoy, but jagi and the baritone of Changkyun’s voice sticks to him like honey. Like the smell of food that clings in the kitchen he’s grown used to. It makes him dizzy, dripping and wanting with so much force his knees buckle in the presence of the younger man. Hands secure in the back of his slender neck as Jooheon spends his time making himself acquaintance with every little detail of Changkyun’s face.

The familiarity of him.

Jooheon had never wanted anything so bad. It consumes him and when he lets it slip out of his tongue and into Changkyun the man shrugs, “Well,” he says with a book in his lap and a lit cigarette between his fingers. “I’m yours,” Matter of fact.

Uh, Jooheon think. Just that. He imagines the sound coming out of his mouth strangled so he bites it back. Teeth sinking in to the soft of his tongue, he still can taste Changkyun.

He watches the celling-fan spinning ever so slowly, the wind blowing a lukewarm breeze inside his tiny room. Everything feels out of balance in that moment, the world is tilted. Jooheon can feel the weight of Changkyun’s gaze on him but can’t bring himself to meet it. Eyes fixed on the old fan that’s probably older than him. Maybe Changkyun is waiting for him to say it back. Maybe he needs it just as bad as Jooheon does, desperate and bursting at seams.

But how can Jooheon can explain that he was falling since he first laid eyes on him? He isn’t that much of a turn-a-blind-eye kind of guy even though he pretends sometimes.

One night Mrs. Chou looks at him and he sees the hesitation on the old woman face. She puts the knife in her hands away, slides the chopped carrots into a big, metal bowl before sighing. “You know,” she starts and doesn’t look at him, busying herself with cleaning the station in front of her, “I took you in. All those years ago I took you in and I may not treat you like a son but you’re still family, Honey.”

Jooheon takes her accent in, the rushed looks she throws at him before pointing to fridge, “get me some more cabbage,” Mrs. Chou asks. His mouth feels sour with the sudden confession. It makes him feel like there’s something crawling under his skin. In the promise of something he doesn’t want to heat his ears ring when he places the cabbage head on the spotless counter.

“The young Korean boy,” She slices the cabbage in half. “Is he good?”

Jooheon ponders.

Changkyun slides of the bed in the middle of the night when he thinks Jooheon is asleep and by morning he’s gone, not realizing Jooheon is awake the moment Changkyun’s arms unwraps themselves of him and he can’t sleep a wink after.

The boy scratches and buries himself underneath Jooheon’s skin and Jooheon can physically feel the warmth of his touches all throughout the day. He can also feel when Changkyun lies to him, the way his mouth twitches and his fingers thumps at his thighs. Changkyun doesn’t even realize he’s doing it.

He doesn’t pry when Changkyun’s cellphone rings and he quickly dismisses himself, nor Jooheon asks him who is it on the other end of the line, but he knows there’s more lying underneath this, what they have.

It’s impossible not to notice the way Changkyun looks at Igor. Wariness and disdain, he tenses every time Vasiliev reaches anywhere near his waist, where his shiny, silver gun rests. Snorts at particular comments, looks like he’s laughing at them not with them.

He’s hiding something, Jooheon feels that also.

So when Mrs. Chou intently looks at him, putting her knife down once again to really look, he doesn’t know what to say. So he shrugs, like Changkyun. “I suppose. Why?”

“He’s better than Vasiliev.”

_Yeah, maybe._

_No. Not maybe. Changkyun is better._

Igor lingers. He physically lingers, brushes his fingers against the exposed skin of Jooheon’s neck and kisses him after paying the bill, when the restaurant is all empty. Tips generously, smiles and pets Jooheon’s shiny, black hair with affection, like one would do with a dog.

Sometimes they lay together and Jooheon takes in the details of the apartment-penthouse around them. On the other side of the city even the air is different.

The older man has art on the walls, books upon books on custom-made shelves and alcohol from all around the world. On those times, Jooheon can’t help but feel like a rescued pet too. Something Igor got on the pound and brought home out of pity, something he can condescendingly pat on the cheek after he comes down from his high.

But it isn’t his own inadequacy that makes Jooheon shivers. Ownership is the word he hears every so often inside his head. Igor puts his arm around Jooheon as if the boy was a high-end accessory. Patronizes him as if he has the right to.

“Don’t trust him, Honey,” she whispers, apparently afraid someone could hear even if it’s just the two of them there. “Never trust him.”

“I won’t.”

And Jooheon doesn’t. He also never says it back when Changkyun tells him “ _I’m yours.”_

Months later it’s easier to believe everything inside the brown manila folder Changkyun hands him one night after they drive together up the mountains. On the back of Changkyun’s vintage motorbike he can feel the way the younger trembles in his arm underneath the worn out leather jacket that has a twang of smoke and motor oil.

Anticipation in his every move Changkyun holds Jooheon face between his hands and kisses him sweetly. He takes his time tasting the cherry lip-balm Jooheon stole from the back pocket of his jeans. He looks him in the eyes and whispers “I need to tell you something.”

Jooheon wishes he was a good actor so he could fake up a reaction of surprise. Instead he nods and waits. He knows something is coming but now that it’s three steps away from him he can feel his stomach twist itself in knots. His toes curl inside his boots and a fat bead of sweat licks down his spine.

He takes a good look as Changkyun robotic moves. Jooheon notices the nibbled skin around his finger nails and the bruise on his lips from the constant chewing Changkyun’s been doing for the past 2 days. He feels odd again, out of place as he sits on the edge of the wood bench waiting to be told there was in fact a joke he wasn’t part of, a secret that changes everything he knows about the man he’s been falling in love with.

Jooheon sighs because between finally waking up to find Changkyun there and being kissed silly in the back alley when Changkyun drops him off after one of their long rides, he knows he never fallen so hard and he can’t simply stop himself from the blooming feeling in his core every time the bell rings and it’s him stepping inside and waving a stupid collectable figurine he got from another new _gachapon_ Changkyun found somewhere in the city. Familiar crocked smile in his sun-kissed face.

_He gives Changkyun everything that night._

He’s way better than Vasiliev and it rips him apart when he opens the folder and eats up every bit of information on the Russian mafia boss.

Changkyun holds him and damply kisses the shell of his ear when Jooheon gags at the words human trafficking and sex slavery. The bile rises up, fire eating him inside out as he dumps everything in his stomach on the ground in hopes he won’t drown in the disgust that bitters his tongue.

Suddenly it’s clear.

“You some sort of spy or what?” Jooheon asks. No. He demands, for the first time, an answer out of him.

“Or what,” Changkyun shrugs. “I like you, by the way.”

“Shut up.”

“No,” he says, boyish. “I like you, Jooheon. I like you and when I leave I want you to come with me.”

Jooheon shakes his head as he boils, pasta water bubbling inside his skull. He drowns a little, gulps a little, bites down a little.

“Where?”

“Anywhere you want.”

He thinks of sandy beaches and tasting coconut out of Changkyun’s bronzed skin.

“You’re going to kill him?”

“No. He’s not the target, Honey.”

“But we should,” Jooheon wants to say. “Kill him, I mean.”

“Okay,” he says instead.

Jooheon still has the wrapper of the bubble-gum Changkyun gave him that night. The manila folder is tucked away in a safe and the bliss in Changkyun’s face still remains in his mind, popping up from time to time and it’s so vastly different from the face right in front of him right now.

He takes in Changkyun with new purpose sweltering beneath his skin.

Changkyun’s changed. He’s angular. Pointy nose, cutting cheeks, straight jaw and high, broad shoulders makes him sharper, less youthful and more solid. Like he’s made of steel and Jooheon briefly wonders if he’s now cold like it or if it’s just the glaze in his eyes, the hazel lost in the murky brown that gaze just above Jooheon’s shoulder, avoiding his face.

There’s new ink poking through the short sleeves of his shirt, the stubble of a beard in his cheeks and a scar peeking from behind his dark hair and into his forehead. He’s more man than boy, it makes Jooheon shudder. The instinct to coil away at the same time he wants to reach out and touch the scar, feel the texture at the tip of his finger, let the warmth soak him up.

Fear blooms inside his chest, anew. He’s suddenly afraid Changkyun’s turned into a stranger, someone he once knew. The same notion has him staggering forward, uncertain of what to do or to think. So incredibly vulnerable it tears all his walls down. He realizes when Changkyun stays still and doesn’t meet his eyes that bigger than being afraid the man is now a stranger, Jooheon hates the idea of him being the one who’s fainting, blurring around the edges even more.

Simply a memory of an affair in one long past summer.

Because there’s not one day Jooheon doesn’t think about him, about what they could’ve become and the ghost of his touch still hunts that one sensitive spot at the back of his thigh.

But Changkyun looks like a new person. It clashes with the memories of him and it makes Jooheon panic while he reaches out, desperate for something he can’t quite name it.

Changkyun tenses but doesn’t move and Jooheon holds him close. Arms curling around his shoulders, hands finding their away in his soft hair as he holds him there for a long while, until Changkyun’s own arms are around his waist, firmly but gentle.

And Changkyun smells like Changkyun but slightly muskier, stronger. His shampoo is still the same, matcha and rice milk, Jooheon recognizes easily and maybe everything’s okay. Maybe Changkyun’s just Changkyun and Jooheon uses his time basking in the sense of knowing and familiarity that comes with his scent. Something he knows so well.

For a moment he doesn’t dare to investigate further just in case he’s wrong. Changkyun doesn’t say a peep. He stays there and hugs Jooheon back, sways them from side to side in an attempt to comfort him or them both, it doesn’t matter because it is working and Jooheon no longer shakes like his bones are rattling.

There’s soft lips kissing his temple and careful hands rubbing at his sides and he sighs utterly and completely taken by the sense of belonging and re-experiencing afresh all in one swinging punch at the pity of his stomach. The air leaves his lungs in one single, long breathe and when it comes back to him he’s filled to the brim with Changkyun.

So much so that for one second he thinks they might’ve merged together, bleed into each other, where one end the other begins with no line in between.

He can feel the hard lines of Changkyun’s body where it once was all baby fat and unbearable softness but he breaths the same, rhythmic and silent. Changkyun still feels the same in Jooheon’s skin. Where his fingertips lick there’s renewed fire burning its way, running a path it was once conquered, making him feverish, shaking for a whole new purpose that goes beyond longing. It is recognition settling in his bones and making his head spin. It feels so good Jooheon might lose his mind.

They never killed Igor. At that point Jooheon supposed they haven’t reached that level yet. Neither of them.

They packed their bags and ran. From the five-star hotel Changkyun booked them they watched the whole thing go down and Mr. Vasiliev being pushed around in handcuffs that shined in contrast to his inked skin.

Funny thing is, Jooheon thought he would feel good. That it would make his tummy go cold and his head light enough to be blown away. He felt good but for an entirely different reason. Jooheon felt good because he was with Changkyun and everything else seems to become so small they’re barely a thing.

Watching Changkyun’s chest raise and fall, bathing his naked skin in moonlight, the world, for a moment, makes sense and Jooheon drinks it like a parched man. Photosynthesis, Jooheon thinks as he absorbers the presence of Changkyun.

That’s how it feels having him right back in his arms. The world makes sense once more.

PART THREE – OF THE QUEENS, THE KINGS AND THE BISHOPS.

“ _From the rubble, what do I see? There’s a whole damn army thikin’ that they’re gonna’ harm me; say goodnight, I’ll never get free. Oh, I got troubles that won’t let me be, but I won’t get tired, set the town on fire ‘till my troubles got trouble with me._

_Thinkin’ that they’ve won, it’s only just begun._

ACT 1.

_When I go into that ground I won’t go quietly, I’m bringing my crown. And when I go into that ground, oh, they gotta’ bury me, bury me face down.”_

_Shat mat,_ Igor Vasiliev whispered to him the last time they saw each other. The proud look on his face constructed to pass along the message lying underneath the sizzling chaos around them.

Jooheon saw the way Igor’s eyes twinkled and for the longest time he thought it was about something Jooheon haven’t yet understood, but all along Igor was silently praising him for being so alike himself.

It was like poison simmering its way below warm, plush skin in long sleepless nights where Jooheon sat awake with a Russian dictionary open in his lap and a bottle of vodka its way only half full on the table.

Where Igor touched the skin still felt feverish, burned to a red shadow of prickly fire. Jooheon would scrub thoroughly, rinse and the do it again twice more, not because he felt dirty, but because he sometimes couldn’t shake the feeling that Igor was contagious, not of disease but of himself.

He was a shitty chess player and he at the end of things never learned how to speak Russian. With the years Igor was faintly a memory, something it once was, and happily would never be again. For Jooheon and the others, the news counted dozen thousands of people trafficked by the same family and carried out by Igor.

It was a sense of relief that kept at bay the guilt and all the other dark feelings over everything that happened that one summer. He watched Igor play chess with himself over and over again. Jooheon liked the way the pieces clacked against each other and the board but he could never understand the trembling pride that flashed in Vasiliev’s eyes every time a new play unlocked from a maze of infinite possibilities. Almost like flapping fish jumping out of the surface and flying in the air just to be engulfed in water yet again.

His mind would wander as he watched less than delicate inked fingers tap against a stubbled chin in preparation for a next move. It was the same tick Vasiliev had when he was making business decision back at the hole-in-the-wall Chinese restaurant.

 _Does Changkyun have a tick like that?_ Because more than anything Jooheon could still smell the other boy in his skin, feel his shadow ghosting over him, the traces he left behind refusing to be washed away.

Changkyun was always in his mind that summer and no one even knows.

It was unbearable. If not him directly then the fuzzy, sharp feeling he caused Jooheon, or the little scattered pieces of him that Changkyun would drop around constantly. Jooheon doubted Changkyun was being purposeful but sometimes he would question himself.

Cherry lip balms, strawberry hearted-lollipop wrappers, a yellow sock, the tickets for the movie they went to see and a single popcorn kernel that fell inside Jooheon’s unbuttoned button-up shirt.

Mrs. Chou sends him a letter once, with a pretty handwriting and a leafy-green wax seal on a crispy white envelope.

 ** _Honey,_** she wrote, **_you and that boy did good._**

 ** _You’re brave_** _._ That gets its own sentence.

 ** _Live a happy life, be good._** And with the thin paper there are two bills of 100 dollars.

Jooheon thinks about her sometimes. These days he can barely remember the smell of the kitchen or how comforting a cup of herbal tea and a few honey biscuits could be. At the time, when the envelope arrived with those brief words, he was six days into mourning his dead boyfriend who had just died in an explosion supposed to kill them both.

He stares at Changkyun for a long time, by right he deserved that, earned the right to ogle at him and he would dare anyone to say a peep about it, doesn’t back down when Changkyun stares back at him. Jooheon doesn’t just look at him; He tries to memorize everything once again, like it’s the first time, as if he wouldn’t recognize Changkyun face with just the tip of his fingers.

There’s something in that face, in that handsome wolfish face, that Jooheon just can’t get enough of. Changkyun shots up at him, sunlight flowing through amber whiskey, so, so bright Jooheon flinches, his thumb and the finger next to pinching the meaty inner part of his thigh to confirm once again, he’s not dreaming, repressing the pain with gritted teeth.

The ice cubes in someone’s drink clink, the stir of the slurp of a straw, it all grates on Jooheon. Rubs at him like two gravely stones rubbing at each other, grating and grounding to dust. The rest of the world keeps moving, spiraling, out of his control and it almost seems unfair that the universe doesn’t stop, that a parade doesn’t come down with balloons and that all the answers that he wants, needs, don’t fall to his lap.

It’s almost like he’s the only truly affected by any of it.

Changkyun isn’t a tree in the forest, when he came down he went loudly, it echoed and kept echoing within Jooheon’s being, a buzz that never stopped buzzing and even now he feels it at his fingertips, the burning behind his eyes and the wrench tight feeling squeezing his chest.

Changkyun never stopped buzzing and that’s not so comforting anymore. It’s a lot infuriating actually, Jooheon concludes, because Changkyun has no right and it’s so goddamn unfair that mourning a dead boyfriend seems a lot more bearable than mourning a non-dead one.

Except it’s not.

And Jooheon thinks it would’ve been easier if they’d never found Changkyun’s body. No, he never ran away with a false sense of maybe Changkyun alive somewhere, hiding. Jooheon stayed even with a bouncer on his head, knowing the explosion was meant for them all along.

Stayed until the firefighters pulled his body – a body, and Hyunwoo had been there to recognize it because Jooheon just couldn’t. The smell of burned flesh still loiters around in his worst nightmares, the melted necklace they retrieved from the body sits heavy on the bottom of his suitcase and his matching one lays atop his chest under his t-shirt, heavy just the same.

Changkyun has a grave, a tombstone of marble and yellow flowers that Jooheon planted himself. But Changkyun’s also right there; if he stretches his arm he can reach an elbow, chewing on the cap of a pen, nodding his head at Hyunwoo talking.

“Any of you familiar with Igor Vasiliev?” he says and that’s not supposed to make sense but it does even if Jooheon wasn’t paying any attention at all. He cowers uncomfortably, shifts his eyes and shifts them again when they land on his boss looking directly at him. “Handsome fella,” Hyunwoo slaps the table with a picture of Igor.

 **“** Don’t let the looks fool you lot, he’s a human trafficker. This man has just about every crime under his belt, he’s part of the Vasiliev family, younger of six brothers and one of the heads of the Red Brotherhood.”

“Why are you telling us this, boss?” Mako obviously cut in without a single penny given. The scowl in his face tells the table he’s not at all entertained by the impromptu lesson on this random Russian mafia guy. “If we’re done here-“ 

“How about you keep your ass sat and save me the trouble.”

Along the years Jooheon came to understand Hyunwoo was never one for cruelty. He dealt with associates-gone-astray the same way they dealt with dogs at the shelter; Painless, quick and effective. A toddler had a more intricate and wider range of emotions than the man himself, who just about could pass a polygraph test with more kills in his belt than anyone Jooheon has ever known.

Hyunwoo was never one for anything, really, expect business and occasionally intense and mind blowing, sizzling sex.

After everything crashed and burned, dressed head to toe in Loro Piana, Hyunwoo knocked in Jooheon’s door with a proposal and a plan. In that same week Jooheon was being hidden away in a tiny villa in rural France while hacking the president whole life into a single memory bank. Who would’ve thought the Red Brotherhood had their foot into the white house and the President had an interest for underage mixed girls from the other side of the planet.

Protection for work, it seemed fair at the time but right now, as Hyunwoo lays thick folders in front of them it all seems a mistake. “How about that retirement we were talking about? Or were you lying about that too?” as he says it Jooheon can see from the corner of his eyes the guilty settle in Changkyun’s face.

Hyunwoo takes a moment to get himself upright, straight as a rule. Jooheon wants so bad to believe he’s just a stuck up, rich mad man with a twisted Robin-hood complex but he knew better and he can’t help but feel small under Hyunwoo scrutiny.

Under miles of perfectly tanned skin and toothy-rabbit smiles there’s a man who drinks beer, not whisky, from peeled glass bottles. The man who taught him how to shot a gun straight and how to give himself a suture is the same man who sends him birthday money and lied about Changkyun’s death.

Business is business after all, Jooheon would never forget and he’s thankful for that.

“Honey, I-“

“Don’t you dare Changkyun or I swear to God you will be dead before you hit the ground,” the clink of Jooheon’s gun echoes loudly. “And this time I’ll make sure you stay dead. Now, boss, what you’ve got to say for yourself?”

Julian and Sue immediately roll their chairs away from the table. Mako eyes him idly, stuck between tediousness and mildly curiosity and Weenie, from his side of the table can relate when Jooheon smacks the table with the butt of his gun, precisely pointed at Hyunwoo.

The silence stretches like skin stretches against bones, a fishing line pulled so taut it unconsciously makes for scrunched up eyes and steps backs just to be out of the way when it does finally snap.

“Have you heard of Luka Vasiliev?” Hyunwoo asks and Jooheon shoots right shoots right above his head. The bullet hits the wall behind him with a thud of sturdy cement. “Goddamn Honey, put it down already,” he says, completely unfazed, like a father dealing with a petulant child who’s throwing a tantrum over the greens in his plate.

“What about him?” Jooheon knows Luka and his entire intern history too. Igor mainly talked about him after a few too many glasses but he knows enough to know Luka Vasiliev is the Pakhan and that the man very much enjoys milf’s every now and then.

“Gentlemen, meet Luka Vasiliev.” Hyunwoo slaps the stack of pictures on the table. Sue, very slowly approaches it and then after looking at it for a second he passes the pictures around. “He’s the Pakhan of the Red Brotherhood, oldest son.”

Jooheon gingerly looks at the picture that reaches him. Changkyun eyes him carefully behind his own. Igor looks younger than Jooheon has ever seen him, in a thick grey coat and leather gloves, coming out of a private jet with Luka by his side. The youngest Vasiliev is maybe 23 at most, Luka on the other hand already sports the early stages of a pot belly and contrary to his brother he no longer has a head full of luscious golden hair. His hair line is thinning and it’s the early 90’s from what Jooheon can tell.

“Are you going to be okay?” Changkyun whispers under his breath. Jooheon wants to whack him behind the head.

“Why wouldn’t I be, dummy?”

“He is our target,” Hyunwoo informs, a picture of Luka goes on the board. “And I’m your client.”

Jooheon head snaps up and away from Changkyun puppy dog eyes looking at him. Hyunwoo is stiff as a board at the head of the table and maybe he wasn’t just posturing minutes ago. Changkyun is quiet, head down; the table is suddenly a mystical creature he just can’t take his eyes off.

Personal.

This is personal, it hits Jooheon. From the very beginning it was all personal and somehow Jooheon just got tangled into it. He is a consequence; Changkyun’s non-death was premeditated as part of a bigger plan. He just wasn’t part of it. It makes sense.

Hyunwoo was the client too all those years ago, his lizard brain supplies, irrefutable when his boss is eyeing him like Jooheon’s a poor orphan that no one will ever adopt. This is part two of the master plan, apparently.

“But first of all,” Boss points at Igor’s profile photo, fresh on the board, just to Luka’s left. “This is Luka’s kid brother, Igor Vasiliev, currently the head of the Red mafia here in the states.”

“I thought he was in prison?” Mako’s asks. The shorter man still looks like he wants to bolt out of there but at least he’s the first one to acknowledge he knows the Vasilievs. “Wasn’t he like put in time out six years ago?”

It’s been six years, until yesterday it seemed like a life time away, now Jooheon thinks it hasn’t been enough time. “He’s still operating from inside,” Jooheon answers the question that wasn’t for him.

“The bastard was in prison at 16, murdered his best friend, Dimitri Potrieski, the sacrificial lamb. At 22 he had already completed his admission rituals and at 24 he first landed here. More precisely,” Hyunwoo puts a New York map on the board and circles it with a red pen ‘New York’. “Here. By the end of the nineties he had already wiped the whole state and put his name everywhere and kept expanding.

“Gun, girls, drugs, you name it and he had a cut in it or was running it solely. At o-two he begins backing up political campaigns and that’s how he has hands in every administration since o-six, from mayors to senators and later the president.”

“And he’s in prison?” Julian doesn’t even try to hide his skepticism, “Doesn’t sound that important to me.”

“Don’t fool yourself,” Changkyun quietly murmurs from his seat. “He’s there because he wants to be there, he’s probably living better than we are out here. Serving time is nothing, if he wants out then he’s out”

Weenie clicks his tongue and looks around, “then what’s the point?” Big mistake, now, Hyunwoo knows he’s interested. “To send him to jail, I mean. If he can get out at any time and he’s still operating, then why?”

“We needed him out of the picture to clear the targets, like the president,” Hyunwoo explains, and thank God he doesn’t put a photo of the balding, round man on the board. “Who was funding the sex trafficking and sex slavery by them and he was not the only one.

“He’s a pillar, one that we took out and today we took another one, Frank Dubois, CEO of one of the biggest banks in America, Igor’s little bitch.”

“Why?” Weenie’s not the only one interested, Mako’s too, is listening by now. “Why take them out instead of Luka or Igor but for good?”

“Take enough pillars and the foundation is going to crumble,” Jooheon softly says; his brain’s finally making send of the unpremeditated lecture on the Red Mafia and their associates. “But why, boss? Why are we- _you_ , why are you trying to make them crumble?”

“If not we then who?”

“Cut the bullshit.”

Hyunwoo’s face is composed but not enough to make the answer stick. “Luka’s coming in three days for a meeting and Igor will be transferring facilities, from Illinois back to New York and eventually back to Russia. He’ll be going home as the new Pakhan, now, that can’t happen can it? No, because they have something of mine and I want it back, so you’re going to get it for me.

“Tomorrow we start phase one. Changkyun’s already on that.” Hyunwoo gestures to a meekly silent Changkyun, motions for him to go on.

Jooheon always knew Changkyun to be bloody brilliant. He was trained to be brilliant, but it was also just the way he was born, for greatness – or greatness as far as crime goes.

Things that Jooheon needed to perfect with hours of hard, brain-cell-frying work, Changkyun could pick up in a few tries. In those months when they worked together doing easy background checks and managing secret bank accounts for Vasiliev he came to understand that it didn’t make him any less smart than he was, Changkyun was just smarter and a pretty good teacher too. It was better than learning from books Jooheon was sure.

“Uh,” Changkyun coughs out. With time Jooheon got used to Changkyun’s accent and how weighty it was in his tongue but hearing it again still made him euphoric in some way. He stands up and reaches for a laptop Hyunwoo passes along. “So, tomorrow by this time the whole country will be in for an hour length essay on our four very important targets and all the data collected will be available in every news site, blog or forum online, we’ll be on TV and the internet simultaneously.

Meet Michael Travesso, Pete Baker, Bryan Carson and Tim Greene.” The screen vibrantly shows the four targets and Jooheon just briefly imagines that maybe Changkyun has a whole power point presentation for them. Out of 4 names he recognizes two.

“Tim Greene the CEO of Insurance Ark?” Mako asks from his seat. He looks skeptical all over again, eyes squinted and arms crossed. “The guy just gave a ted talk last month on this ground breaking and affordable bionic proteases for military amputees.” The sniper shrugs, “What has he done?”

It’s funny how Changkyun’s smug without being smug. It drives Jooheon crazy how he nonchalant maintain his calm winning or losing, that damn half smile tugging at his lips as he scratches on a probably non-itch spot in his cheek. “I don’t know,” Changkyun shrugs too. “What is the ethical way of using his charity organization for poor orphan kids from the other side of the planet as his personal drug mule market? The guy cut a deal with Igor without so as much as a little pressure of a gun at his forehead. They all have.

“They’re big names, hot shots but we’re in the age of holding people accountable, the internet and media will do the rest of the work for us, I just need to get inside.”

Jooheon wants to kiss Changkyun until his lips are numb and raw. He wants to hold him and take out of him the pieces that are missing from himself. Changkyun would probably let him.

From the way he looks at him to the way his knee bump with Jooheon’s under the table, accidentally purposeful, Jooheon suspects Changkyun would let him do more than borrow some pieces.

“Seems like you got it all figured it out, why _we_ here?” Marko barks back as if Changkyun just stole his bone.

Hyunwoo chuckles, “every plan needs a bomb,” he says. From his files he pulls yet another set of pictures, this time, different locations. Bank of America stares right back at Jooheon when Sue slides the pictures over. “When Luka gets on that plane and never makes it over the ocean we’re going to have an army of Russians trying to get their paws on Igor and you guys won’t let it happen.

“I need you guys causing chaos all over the city while we extract Igor out. Whose dreams are to be our propaganda child?”

“Me,” Julian promptly raises his hand and Sue hacks him behind the head. “What? We’re already on the FBI wanted list.”

“Why do you need a poster boy?” Sue asks. “I don’t get it.”

“To get the message across,” Changkyun chirps in. “Here,” he points to the map on the table. “See? We’ll close and jam all main avenues, no way in or out of the city, no way to navigate, police needs to believe we’re a group of extremists.”

“How are we going to close all main avenues?” Weenie plays with a pen, intently looking at a picture in front of him. Jooheon wants to know what he’s thinking.

“You’ll see,” Hyunwoo shrugs, Jooheon rolls his eyes. “Meanwhile, I need a bomb planted in each one of these locations.”

“You’ll bomb the whole city? That’s insane, there’ll be civilians!” Shaking his head Weenie finally looks up. Mako seems to have something to say too, Sue and Julian not so much.

“He’s right. You can’t just hurt innocent people.”

“What do you guys peg me for, for god’s sake? The bombs won’t be real, but police won’t know that and they’ll be swamped with anonymous reports of very suspicious looking packages in very crowded places.”

Jooheon wants to say he’s surprised but nothing comes out of his mouth, one; because he isn’t and two; because Changkyun toes with the hem line of his waits pants. It’s an anchor and a 50 pound boulder attached to his ankle, he’s sinking in place, dropping and not even looking up. He likes the feeling.

ACT 2.

Jooheon like leather. The way it groans and moans under pressure makes him tingly, feeling some type of way, skin tight and so much bigger than he actually is.

The leather makes its rasping sound of friction and his leather pants are bounding him to his motorcycle seat. Thighs shinning under the mid-morning gentle sun. Behind him Changkyun’s R1 purrs, big black cat throwing a tantrum against the warm asphalt. Jooheon misses Changkyun’s vintage cruiser one, all chrome and shinning black paint but the big beast between Changkyun’s thighs look good too and he can’t help but steal a glance even if the sun shines against his eyes. Blind for a second, seeing an angel or something holy must feel the same way, he thinks, Changkyun engulfed by sheer, gold air.

His H2R makes a noise, _I know, girl,_ he pats at her side as he gets faster and faster, leaving Changkyun behind a curve, lost for the few seconds it takes for him to catch up, groaning loudly, spoiled.

It feels like two big felines playing a game of catch on the seemingly infinite black line of asphalt.

In Jooheon’s ears the beep of the intercom rings rather loudly, annoying, in sync with the time winking in his wrist watch. It blinks at him languidly, urges him to slow down. Begrudgingly he does until he’s floating smoothly in the wide stretch of the straight highway ahead of him.

Changkyun rides besides him, same speed, however, much more ease in his shoulders, just enjoying the lick of wind that slaps at him, _the cheeky bastard,_ he signalized for Jooheon to open his helmet, thumb going up, up and up.

“We’re almost there,” He sings songs and Jooheon has the itch to kick his bike’s tire just to see Changkyun flying off the highway. There are no cars for miles, he could get away with it, but Changkyun smiles, crocked and tired.

“Time to roll then,” Jooheon mutters behind shifty eyes. He doesn’t know how Changkyun works, never had the chance to learn, but something tells him it’s cocky, matter-of-fact and dark. Jooheon hate-loves it, “Try to catch up.”

Jooheon rides like there’s a four paw monster right behind him, claws clinking crystal clear. Changkyun is loose, bouncing on clouds and going so fast the straps of his jacket flap against the wind wildly, going through the vortex of chaos that is bound to happen the same way a confident toddler sticker a silver fork in a power outlet just to see it sparkle.

One leads, the other chases the burned tires and Changkyun likes the view if Jooheon’s broad-ish shoulder and lean, fit-in-one-arm waist. They catch up to an imposing greyhound and the signals come fast, one after the other like lights in a machine. The blood pumps, in his ear Jooheon hears curling tongues and wail cries, synchronizing music and memory.

The bus, hard chicken-wired windows and metallic shining, gets sandwiched between the two motorcycles and trouble starts to swizzle from the inside out like gutting a whale from inside its belly. “C’mon, baby, are you ready?” Changkyun screams in Jooheon’s earpiece.

He can’t say yes neither he can say no. in that moment his mouth is made solely for the purpose of keeping his folded tongue and nothing else. Jooheon can’t see Changkyun but the world doesn’t change, only if significantly more warm, its stays the same.

Changkyun has a memorial stone but he’s behind 6 feet of metal instead of dirt and Jooheon can deal with that. “You can’t die,” He says. “You hear me, Im Changkyun? You won’t die anytime soon.”

Chuckling airily “Well,” Changkyun answers. “I wasn’t planning on it.”

“Good,” Jooheon let’s go of the handles and falls behind. “Let’s keep it that way.”

Tapping on his watch the same time it blinks red Jooheon can hear Changkyun’s R1 roaring angrily. Metal hits asphalt like spiky coins hitting the floor and boom goes into air twice. Boom of explosion, and swoosh of air emptying from tires and screech of rubber in a wail, the cacophony plays out in a matter of seconds. In the chaos destruction is beautiful somehow and Jooheon who stays behind grabs on the door handle of the back of the bus so firmly the world goes mute. 

Jooheon can’t heart the bus hitting the road-bed; neither can he hear two bangs of a gun being fired somewhere. He can feel it though, his feet hitting the ground and the wobbling bus under his gloved fists, the mechanics of the door giving in and opening, the weight of his gun from his waist pants to the steady of his hands.

His motorcycle goes to the ground, he still can’t hear it, head under water while only being wet under the armpits. He can’t help it. The door flies with a bang too, it takes no more than a few second so he can see Changkyun again.

There he stands, at the end of the long, narrow corridor of seats, cheek smeared crimson saying something, lips moving in slow motion. Jooheon can breathe, when his helmet comes off so does the silence. The world creeks and shifts like the insides of a huge creature, a beast with four lungs and two hearts the size of a small forest of adult sequoia trees, Jooheon, fleet thought as they come, thinks that maybe Changkyun feels the same way he does.

Changkyun smiles, a memory of a summer damp night from many years ago burning fire hot and icy cold, with a blast of air the sounds of heavy breathing and metal pinging unscrews the worm whole they found themselves in.

In the city in the distance the world explodes once more and from the sky it rains green, fresh-never- toucher American money.

“It’s raining babes,” Sue’s voice comes through the earpiece and Jooheon can’t help but flinch with a laugh. Changkyun follows.

They know Julian’s probably having fun reading from the prompter Hyunwoo prepared last night while his baby-boy young face is displayed all over the city and his voice is honey smooth in every radio station this state and maybe the next. Technology from all generations.

“Did ya fellas bring an umbrella?” Changkyun sniggers, head shaking from one side to the other and Jooheon can agree with that. “Our boss is too much sometimes.”

Igor sits still in a window seat, a big looking buddy sitting right next to him. His eyes are round like macadamia nuts, looking so blue it hurts, chest clad with orange. If Jooheon didn’t know better he would feel pity.

He knows better though. He knows Igor’s buddy is probably a murder machine and the other orange buds in the bus know Russian better than Jooheon ever will. “Izvinite,” – _I’m sorry_ – He risks it anyway, “Ya bespokoilsya?” – _Did I make you anxious?_ ”

Jooheon’s gun is safety off and directly between big guy eyes. Igor eyes him idly after he seems to swallow his shock in one big gulp, his eyes shine with something that makes Changkyun, from the other side of the bus, groan low in his throat.

“At last, the prodigal son returns home,” Igor muses, big guy doesn’t move when he rises to his feet, neither does Vasiliev gives him the order to smash Jooheon’s brain in, “You know, you could’ve just made an appointment, Dorogoy.”

Jooheon pretend-shudders, “You know me Igor, too pretty for prison.”

Vasiliev laughs, because it’s always been that way. Jooheon somehow could make Igor laugh easily but it felt condescending all the same, an adult amused by a no-filter-yet child.

“Kto budet nastol’ko glup chtoby prikosnut’sya k suke bossa?” _– Who would’ve touched the boss’ bitch? –_

 _“_ Would they still respect you if they knew your bitch put you in prison to help your underling all while he couldn’t just get enough of bending me over?”

Jooheon will never be anyone’s bitch. He taught himself better but he knows how to dig deeper, to make a wound saltier. It’s like ozone in the air, choking throats and snapping eyes in all directions, almost theatrical. “Now, should we just finish this?”

Igor doesn’t answer, instead he taps at big guys shoulder, “You would’ve made an excellent toy, baby boy, it’s a shame it all went to waste.”

Changkyun knows what’s coming and Jooheon’s name leaves his mouth in a warning but before anyone can get up or say anything Jooheon puts a bullet in the guy’s leg, it rings inside the metal can and in everyone’s ears.

“C’mon, Igor, let’s not make this harder,” Jooheon phony-begs between agony screams that sound too much too high for a guy that size. “Let me make this clear, if any of you so much so as twitch I’m putting all my four bullets inside your boss head and after I’m done, Volkov here will be putting a bullet in each one of your heads so I suggest we just make this nice and easy, so you can go back to you families that by the way, just got a big fat check in the mail today.”

The bus goes so silent if a pin dropped it could’ve easily echoed, all eyes stray away from Igor, except Jooheon’s. “Don’t be sad Igor; everyone has their priorities.”

From the top of the highway they can hear music blasting and Changkyun acts on instinct, like he knows what to do all along. From his back pocket comes off keys and he’s quickly raising them to eye level. “Car keys,” he sings song. “There are cars just over the hill, get there and you’re going to find clothes, money and new passports.”

There’s a moment of silence, a beat of doubt that lasts over than a few seconds, and then there’s no one left, shoes beating the floor quickly and disappearing over the music getting closer.

“Our ride is here. You might wanna buckle up, Mr. Vasiliev.”

PART 4 – OF TOAST JESUS AND GHOSTS.

“Trouble on my left, trouble on my right, I’ve been facing trouble almost all my life.”

The stain on the wall looks like a face and Jooheon stares at it or a long beat, waiting for the eyes will to life. Give him a grin, a sign, his own personal toast-Jesus.

Pareidolia, it was called, the ability to see patterns on things, a phenomenon except Jooheon has giant puzzle in front of him and no idea of how to go on about fixing it. His head hurts and the dejavu from the situation makes him a little tilted, a little out of breath.

Weenie, the poor bastard sets a bottle of whisky on the table with a soft clink, cautious not to break the tension with his barely audible footsteps out of the room. Jooheon thanks him with a smile and goes on pushing two crystal tumblers to the center of the metal tale with a loud, whiney scrap.

It doesn’t fit, Jooheon groans about the inadequacy of the glass on the rusty surface, a fish out of water slapping against hard concrete. He just doesn’t know if he’s the fish or another fish. The liquid sloshes lazily, woosh in its on bottle. The gold catches the clinical light above the table and dances in wavy patterns, reminding Jooheon of an idle lake.

The cap comes off with a pop, the pressure wheezing, it’s not champagne but it sounds beautiful nonetheless. Smells old, robust, probably one of kind, scenting the stale air, giving Jooheon an out of the moldy, damp smell in the room. The stain on the wall is probably water damage not a miracle. The liquor goes easy into the glass, gulp gulp gulp onwards, three fingers later he fills the other one, pushes towards Igor and grabs his own.

Igor looks at him, really looks, trying to pick him apart, maybe he’s trying to catch a glimpse of something more familiar, warmer than the flat expression on Jooheon’s face.

“Drink up, old man.”

Vasiliev laughs down his throat, not quite a scoff not quite a snort, although surprised. His handcuffs tinkle together, metal on metal against the table and then against fragile crystal.

He looks older, salt-and-peppered, blue eyes with more wrinkles since the last time, a whole new array of little details to uncover. It makes Jooheon uncomfortable. He doesn’t have the upper hand, what he knew slipped and faded somewhere years ago. It’s like playing with a bad hand. Igor lip is split open, the bottom one, and before taking a sip he tongues at the wound, eyes locked on Jooheon’s face.

Jooheon only regrets it wasn’t him that landed the punch, Changkyun bloody knuckles makes more sense now. He wishes no one like Igor Vasiliev could age that well maintained, all clean haircuts, golden bands and royalty-pills for breakfast, lunch and dinner. The man was feed like a king, Jooheon can tell by the girth of his middle wrapped in an obtuse and headache inducing orange. The pot belly ran in the family, but the handsome features that was all Igor.

Genetics is funny that way.

He can imagine proud parents and jealousy stricken siblings in a twisted childhood. Jooheon can’t help but think that Igor was born to fit a role, carefully planned successor from a hand-picked mother. The concept of Igor growing up anywhere but in a cold isolated mansion in a state full of cold faced employees and absent parents is hard to grasp, mulls over, chews at him, no one with loving parents and warm Christmas could possibly turn out that rotten.

“Did your mother ever love you?” Slips out of Jooheon lips, honey laced, no malice but poisonous all the same. He doesn’t even realize, “Mine died, can’t even remember her face.”

Igor seems to take a moment to analyze where Jooheon’s coming from, his drinks wobbles and he grins a little, finely tickled albeit confused. Jooheon doesn’t promise torture but he isn’t above it, makes it clear in the way he takes a sip of his drink and waits for an answer.

“My mother,” Igor cleans his throat. “She was a sweet faced thing.”

Whiskey makes Jooheon a lot numb in very few sips, post-dentist like, but he can tell there’s more in there, prologue for a story, he just doesn’t know if it’s more Norma-Bates or Dee-dee-Blanchard kind of way, it makes him shudder just the same.

“Round cheeks, fat lips,” Jooheon catches himself thinking about the guys on the other side of the glass and what were they thinking. Hyunwoo had too much faith in him, Changkyun had too little, but no one can blame him. Jooheon has to regulate his breathing as Igor keeps going. “This nice curve to her hips, you know?”

He doesn’t know, but little does it matter.

“She was a lot like you, Malysh,” comes in sweet drenched calmness, “a fucking conniving little fox.”

Jooheon shrugs like it was a question and he had any say in it, “well,” he sighs, “I suppose she didn’t love you then.”

“She died, not from old age I tell you,” Igor humors out, not even second later, going for a jab, maybe trying to paint out Jooheon’s future for him. “Do you appreciate life, gorovit’ vkradchio?”

Jooheon finds it slightly comical, “c’mon Igor, you can do better than that.” He has memories of Igor mean snare, calm icy eyes while coaching one of his guys pull the trigger, gun against his own head and falsely accused of being a traitor _. It’s treason,_ Igor shrugs, dictating his crime, feeding him a single bullet, gifting him the warm colt python from where it sat against his hip.

The guy trembles, bones made of sticks, skin so clammy low-blood sugar was a suspect if not for the situation. There’s a bar of chocolate somewhere in Changkyun’s slung-crossed bag and Jooheon is tempted just so the guy would stop, stay still, and maybe say something to save his life. The chamber spins at the flick of pale, shaky fingers, quick-casino sound filling their ears before the click, click – insistent, click. Bang.

“Tell me, boy,” Vasiliev finishes his drink, one gulp, doesn’t even flinch. The word feels foreigner, detached. “Do you really think you’re better than me? Different?”

Jooheon shakes his head idly, the back of his throat makes a noise, gritty feel of sand grinding between his teeth. There’s nothing there, “do you?” he asks. “Think I’m different, I mean.”

There’s a thick pile of invisible, growing by the second and stacking up higher, of all the things Jooheon ratter be doing. Cutting onions, stealing cherry-shiny kisses, telling Hyunwoo to go fuck himself, it would be easier instead if everything was this easy. Question, answer and be done with it, in that order.

He can see when Igor, shark that smelled fresh blood, thinks he found something. Dog with a bone he bites and the hard line of his features turn soft, for confidence not pride, eyes going rounder and mouth going wider in a long line. Ever the analyst he analyzes, look deep into Jooheon eyes who looks right back at him, holds the stare for a long swirl of the clock. Jooheon knows how to look vulnerable, pitiful, experienced in begging for food in houses with too many mouths to feed.

“I made you, dorogoy,” shaking his head calmly Igor spits. “I picked and made you,” he clarifies and Jooheon knows he means you’re mine, therefore, made by my resemblance, but not better. Vasiliev has the nerve of sounding betrayed, Judas, probably at the tip of his tongue.

There’s a Virgin Mary cradling a crocked face, baby Jesus hidden behind the orange uniform. Jooheon has seen it, touched it, never understood it however. Changkyun once told him there’s something to do with prison being home and crime being blood he suspects that maybe Igor thinks it’s the retelling of his birth.

“Tsk,” Jooheon tongue clicks loudly. “You’re foolish if you don’t think I was cunning from the beginning. You didn’t pick me, I picked you and then I didn’t.”

The chair squeaks loudly under Igor’s weight shifting, compressing, bones of his spine popping like firecrackers and then expanding, his lungs releasing an ungodly amount of warm air. He’s still fit under the jumpsuit, his bones still are fine structure for finely taut skin despite the crowns around his eyes but for some reason he feels heavier. His grieving eyes glance to the sealed, dirty mirror and then back at Jooheon. “You’re either dumb or a whore so tell me, how much did they pay you?”

It’s like a rock hitting a pane of glass, crack and bleed until it reaches the corners and explodes. The glass is no longer whole and Jooheon can feel icy-cold in his veins, the silverware in his pockets crinkle together, bells from a faraway, decaying, little church, dinging and dinging, so heavy he has to un-pocket them.

One by one he lays them on the table, a metallic thud each. The serrated knife goes easily, perfectly straight when the light caches on it, the fork wobbles, and the spoon makes half-moons for a second but they are all parallel to each other.

Before going on Jooheon reaches for his back pocket, his wallet comes loose from his back pocket and from it he takes out two notes of a hundred dollars. Igor watches him, can’t keep the curiosity out of his face and when Jooheon gives him the two folded bills he reaches for it to closely inspect them.

“That’s how much I made for betraying you.”

“You’re a dumb whore then,” Igor nods; Scowl twisting his face, deepening his ageing lines. “Never pegged you for the lightest bulb but this? Not even spare change.”

“Maybe,” Jooheon leans in, elbows on the table, “you’re just-” his eyes shift over the man’s face, slowly. Igor leans in as well. “Cheap. Maybe, you’re just cheap, sir.”

Igor’s eyes go bigger, rounder, a new born seeing for the first time, flashing cold blue in realization, old betrayal and a want for vengeance. Vasiliev’s hand goes wide, the chain snap, completely extended and Jooheon closes his eyes waiting for the hard slap Igor was preparing for.

Jooheon knew was getting more than a busted lip from Changkyun if the slap ringed. He could almost see the restlessness of him all the way from here, with his eyes closed but the contact comes in form of a cold hand laying against his cheek carefully, engulfing half of his face in a sweet cradle that shouldn’t belong to such a horrible person.

“Now,” Jooheon whispers the same way one talks to a dog that just peed put of the pad, “you have something my boss wants and you’re going to tell me where it is and how to get it.”

And when he opens his eyes Igor is there, brain turning so obsessively that Jooheon can almost hear it like a buzz of a machine.

“Oh Malysh,” Igor whispers back, nose sniffing Jooheon, hand still in his cheek, “Why would I do that?”

“Did you know that one of the most sensitive parts of the body is your fingertips?” Jooheon only has time to finish before a thumb brushes against his bottom lip, “A lot of nerve endings.”

“You would do so well on my side, you know that?” Igor brushes his finger there again and again. “I could teach you some more effective ways of getting your answers.”

Jooheon’s fingers wrap around the slim and cold handle of the serrated knife and he breaks the contact, going back until his shoulders hit the back of the chair. “This?” he carefully waves the knife around. “The knife is to cut. The fork is to poke. The spoon is to scoop.”

“We’re having a meal now, are we?” Igor smiles, shoulders slouched.

Jooheon smiles back, dimples poking his cheeks like he’s been sculpted from marble, “I’m going to shove this whole knife under your nails and then I’m gonna use this fork to make you deaf, you know, can’t miss the eardrums pain, right? And then if you’re still not talking I’m going to scoop out your eyeball, don’t play with me Igor, I only need your mouth working.”

Igor scoffs, hands hitting the table with a loud bang “You’re a tough guy now huh? You dirty little whore!” he screams, head shaking from one side to the other. “Let me tell you something, I liked you better when you were a moaning mess of boy goo, now, I’m gonna have to gut you, Dorogoy.”

“Where is it Igor?” Jooheon asks, the bait is there for him to bait but he doesn’t take. “Don’t make me do something you’ll probably have nightmares about.”

Jooheon is stone. He is round, soft, and hefty but he is also cold, grey marble, from the veins in his arms to the unsettling noise he makes at the back of his throat, disapproving when Igor tells him to go fuck himself. Changkyun shudders from the other side of glass, he watches and can’t take his eyes away even when the chair scrapes on the floor and Jooheon is no longer, dewy eyed, baby faced Honey.

Changkyun feels guilty all over again, stricken in the head, and his hand hovers above the door handle about three times before he turns to Hyunwoo and says “We need to take him out of there.”

It is his own dejavu.

“Quit it,” Jooheon tells Changkyun. “You’re being silly.”

Changkyun sits on the edge of the bed, bare feet on marble floor and goosebumps all over from the chilly breeze coming from the wide open veranda door where Jooheon stands naked. He watches the same marble skin raise and fall, involved in white smoke from a lit cigarette sitting forgotten. “Why?”

Jooheon looks at Changkyun like he just hanged the moon and colored the sky rainbow. Sometimes he loses his breathing, the world turns sunshine bright and Changkyun is right there just existing but it’s somehow enough.

To Changkyun is more than that. His life is divided in before and after Jooheon, he’s seeing light for the first time.

From a young age Changkyun was to himself what the world failed to provide, he fitted in every hole that needed fixing until Jooheon, sweaty and red in the cheeks appeared in that doorway. There was a Jooheon shaped cranny that he just couldn’t fill.

“ _You’re_ being silly!” Changkyun stands from white fluffy sheets so he can hold Jooheon in his arms. “You’re free now, you can work with me, and we can run away, go anywhere you want.”

That was the first time Jooheon thought of sandy beaches and the first time Changkyun realized he would do anything to protect Jooheon, whatever it was, because he says yes and kisses him like they have all the time in world.

He thinks about that when Hyunwoo calls him the next day and a week later he’s still thinking about it when the hotel-room they are explode in loud noises and smoke. He’s thinking about that all the times he made sure Jooheon’s life was hidden, and it’s all he can think about when he plans The Vasiliev’s family fall.

This time Changkyun doesn’t have to go anywhere however he still can’t move and put a stop to it.

“He doesn’t need saving,” Hyunwoo tells him, eyes on the glass window, and he’s right. Igor screams for the first time to confirm.

Changkyun has memories of back dark alleys, yellow lights, menthol cigarettes and bubblegum shared kisses.

He can hear Jooheon humming in the dawn of night, see his back bones as he works to scrub big pans, feel Mr. Socks fur between his fingers. Changkyun has nightmares where everything turn to ashes, vanishes before his eyes and he is, yet again, all alone.

“You know, I like when you sing,” he says to Jooheon’s back, clad in a white wife-beater and drenched in sweat. Jooheon just hums, softly chuckling, never stopping the scrubbing. The kitchen smells of food and detergent.

Mr. Socks meows loudly when Changkyun quits scratching behind his ears and Changkyun’s bones crack just as loud when he gets up from the floor, leftovers left behind just so he can reach for Jooheon.

He has an itch he can’t scratch.

Jooheon sings Paul Anka, nearly perfect English rolling off his tongue, swaying his hips to his own voice and to the soft hands of Changkyun. “Put you head on my shoulder, hold me in your arms, baby.”

Changkyun laughs, cheek to shoulder, hands holding, oh-squeeze-me, waist. He sometimes dreams of sharing paradise with Jooheon, he could do this all his life, guide Jooheon across dirty floors, hold him close, and hear him whispering cheesy lyrics in his ear.

“Squeeze me oh so tight…” Jooheon squeals when Changkyun pulls him up and spins them between cooking paraphernalia.

They sing together, they laugh and they kiss.

“Put your lips next to mine, dear…”

“You think he’ll talk?” Sue’s asks after nearly gagging. Julian, Weenie and Mako, left 15 minutes ago, Hyunwoo stands stoic. Changkyun prays.

“He just did,” their boss says, perfect conviction cut off by a particularly gnarly scream.

Jooheon taps on the glass with a spoon, “well,” he says “he’ll be keeping his eyes, boys.” Igor shakes in his seat, bloody fingertips trembling on the table, but he still doesn’t look worse than Jooheon, hunted look on his face. “C’mon in and get you address, boss.”

_“Won’t you kiss me once, baby, just a kiss goodnight, maybe?_

Hyunwoo does, with a pen and a paper just for appearances. Jooheon watches besides Changkyun who feels that itch again, uncontrollable need to scratch. “You did good.”

“You think so?”

“Yeah, Honey, I do.”

It feels like a victory. The well-deserved one Changkyun’s been waiting for. Jooheon can feel it too.

_“You and I will fall in love.”_

Igor asks for some last words and Jooheon gives it to him after squeezing Changkyun’s hand two times.

Changkyun can see it happening in slow motion, life plays tricks on him once again and in one second to the other Jooheon is no longer standing; Smile wiped out of his face, but in the floor, hands to his stomach, coughing blood, the knife he used lodged deep inside his guts.

“I told you I would gut you, _Dorogoy_.”

_“People say that love’s a game, a game you just can’t win…”_

Bang, echoes deep within inside everyone in the room and Changkyun’s paralyzed, completely frozen. Igor’s brain matter splashes over the water damage on the corner and he falls to the ground just the same, dead. Sue’s shot him.

Jooheon’s not. Not yet, Changkyun tells himself, willing himself to unfreeze and do something, anything he could. He won’t be.

“It okay, everything’s going to be okay,” he tells the room by Jooheon’s side who scoffs. 

“There’s a knife in my stomach, silly,” he squeezes out, teeth stained crimson.

“Shh, don’t talk. Hyunwoo, go call Kihyun, do something,” Changkyun’s desperate, panicked, hand over the knife, holding it in place, warm, red, metallic. “Kihyun’s going to fix you, baby, it’s fine, just a scratch, ok?”

Jooheon’s head shake from one side to the other and he smiles, tears falling down his chubby, cherub cheeks. His blinking slows down, and his breathing is haggard.

“Listen, here, listen to me,” with one hand Changkyun holds his cheek, “You know I love it when you sing, so sign to me baby, c’mon.”

The world slows down to barely a heartbeat per minute, Changkyun can’t breathe, can’t think about anything, he holds on tight, tighter than he ever did, dangling in a abysm of his own fears turning to reality. Jooheon tries to laugh, comes out a sob.

“Put your head on my shoulder,” he chokes out and Changkyun sobs with him.

PART 5 – OF SALT WATER AND INK.

“ _A lot is said about love but not enough is said about the way you love me.”_

Something keeps scratching in that one place in Jooheon's ribs where he's ticklish. It's gentle but purposeful and it annoys him when it doesn't stop so he bats at it blindly, fingers scraping something warm and solid. He still can't quite open his eyes and he even doubts he's awake.

Rem sleep, he read it once, something like that. It feels like a impenetrable but transparent veil he just can't shake it off. It's tight and he's a second away from snapping or having a panic attack. Like being buried in sand or trying to get into a pair of jeans 2 sizes too small when your skin is still damp from the shower. It drives him slightly crazy.

The scratching circles around his chest wet and warm and Jooheon sighs. Feels good and he let it go, floating, brain turning to mush he barely has any coherent thoughts.

" _You picked the wrong man to push_ ," a voice says in his head, it sounds awfully like him but not like him at all. He wants to tell it to fuck off, but he doesn't even know what it's talking about. " _No, Trautman, **he** picked the wrong man!_"

Jooheon scoffs lightly. Who the fuck is Trautman? It's funny, so he laughs a little, or so he thinks he does. _"The boy's a heart attack,"_ the voice says, apparently it's a dialogue.

He thinks he's dead, and then crazy and then kidnapped, all in a spam of a few seconds. _"...he's been through a whole lot worse, in a lot worse places than this. I'm just amazed he allowed any of your posse to live._ "

_Uh._

He feels the scratching around his neck, feathery first, barely there. It doesn't feel uncomfortable until it turns insistent and all his senses are throwing him off, making him squirm trying to get off. His numbed arms weight a ton but he manages to bat it off again, this time he manages a slap that rings around his head for a while.

Whatever it is, it stop and Jooheon sighs once more.

His tongue feels double its size inside his mouth so he pushes it out and bites on it. The pain definitely tells him he's alive. It's sobering but he still can open his eyes, doesn't want to, wants to go back to sleep but his brain won't let him. _"You want a war you can't win?"_ he tells himself inside his head. It's clearly him but he's not in control of it.

" _Are you telling me that 200 of our man against your boy is a no-win situation for us?"_

Sometimes, in anxiety filled nights when he couldn't sleep, Jooheon would get into a state in between consciousness, neither asleep nor awake, where he would lie down listening to his brain talk to itself of things he didn't know. It sounded a lot like television and those paper-cover novels he used to read and right now this feels like it, but at the same time he could be well hidden into a bunker with his kidnappers talking around him.

Or maybe he's gone mad.

_"You send that many you don't forget one thing."_

_"What?"_

_"A good supply of body bags."_

Oh fuck off, he thinks. Fuck the fuck off, and he laughs silly, coughing when the sound punches out of him no more than a strangled wheeze.

It feels like his insides fell of and then were rearranged back together in all the wrong places, Jooheon winces at the pain that travels all along his left side and for the first time in those minutes, he really breathes, lungs burning with the sudden expansion, sharp-teeth pain biting inside his ribcage as he takes a lung full of fresh, cool air.

Smells oddly of sandalwood and ocean breeze and he breathes more of it. Warm and snug like a blanket, musky in a way that it's sweet and tingly, and just a tinge of something chemical in there, like antiseptics. It makes his nose crinkle.

When fingers, not his, make their way up his chest very gently he notices the lack of a barrier there. Bare skin making contacting with bare skin, from his navel all the way up to his neck and then his cheek, where it lays still and solid before it caress the skin softly. Jooheon doesn't feel panicked, instead he relaxes even more.

 _"I wish I was back in Bragg right now,"_ it's the line that makes him snap. Suddenly he's no longer asleep but waking up, sluggish and drowsy but still his eyes make an effort to blink open.

It takes a few times for there to be more than darkness. His neck lolls to one side and the other as if it would help. It's all a blurry first, colors floating and then big shapes and then just one shape off in the distance. Jooheon focuses in it and squints.

His body is yet too heavy to do anything more than just lay there and wait.

Despite not having a t-shirt on he's not cold at all. In fact he feels all to warm.

From the other side of the room, against a heavy, bared-wood door frame leans a boy with dark hair as dark as a winter night and Jooheon goes back in his first theory, maybe he's dead after all.

The boy, no older than 11, looks at him curiously, fascinated about something, Jooheon just blinks back, groggy. One of his eyes is blue, icy the same way the ocean is in Antarctic, and the other is oak brown, almost autumn-y but still too warm.

Odd, Jooheon’s almost-empty brain replies to nothing, there's something in the kid's face that's uncanny familiar. He feels like he's seen that face before but in a much bigger person, round cheeks, chubby lips and definitely mixed the kid smiles at him sheepishly before ducking away, as if he just got caught.

The space where he was stands empty for a long heartbeat. Jooheon can see yellow walls from a corridor beyond the ajar door. The yellow is pastel but vibrant enough. Just to left there's a piece of a picture frame and the light shines on it from a probably big window out of view.

 _Where is he?_ His body wants to move but he's too afraid of the pain he knows is still there. Groaning his neck flops back into place and he needs to blink several times again.

 _Wolf_ , he groans. Jooheon sometimes still gets surprised by that wolfish face, this doesn't feel new, a little foolish but it feels good. When his eyes focus on the man in front of him, sitting in the bed at his side and staring down at him something inside Jooheon vibrates and his blood turns into thick molasses, running slow and pleasurably sweet in his veins.

Jooheon wants to reach out and wipe his thumb at Changkyun’s forehead to smooth out the frown in there. He sighs, suddenly happy, probably blissed out because he can't control his face he realizes when he feels his lips curling up. He hopes so much this isn't heaven.

That one conversation they had 6 years ago comes back to him in a flash as he looks deep into the amber pools that are Changkyun's eyes.

A thought comes to him, invasive and not at all adding up to something, " _He's my hot nurse, uh?"_ though it makes him laugh anyway. This time a chuckle actually echoes in his throat, makes him rumble. "You're so hot," he cracks out, scratchy. Changkyun from his place looks indignant, disbelief as he shakes his head but fails to hide a tiny smirk.

“Idiot."

He wonders if Changkyun really meant it that one night, if that was him trying to tell Jooheon about their future or him not thinking about it at all. It all the same feels unfair, something no one had the right to do to him. Would it have hurt any less if Jooheon knew Changkyun was out there all along, Jooheon also ponders. It would've transformed him into an obsessed man, probably. Either way, it doesn't feel good, but he can't help but feel grateful.

"Did you mean it?" he asks, voice barely there. Trying his hardest to make his arm move to feel for the younger's hand.

Changkyun is startled by the question. "Uh?" he murmurs back, eyes going back and forth. There's a tinge of confusion in his face, eyebrows pinching the chunk of flesh between them.

"Are you still mine, _Im_ _Chang-Kyun_?"

The man calms down, forehead smooth once again. He doesn't look pensive, rather he seems to relax, his weight leaning just slightly against Jooheon as he smiles.

"Always," Changkyun whispers bending down to nose against his cheek, " _Lee Joo-heon,"_ and in that Jooheon reclaims his place in the word.

Not as an orphan or a waiter with a Chinese foster mom. Not as a criminal and not as Changkyun's lover either. He's Lee Jooheon.

 _Not Honey, not Jagi, not Malysh_.

Lee Joo-Heon. And he is of himself.

When he steps into the room the chatter and sounds of silverware hitting glass plates stops, one would think he stinks and although he does feels icky from a week without a shower, the towel-cat-bath Changkyun gave him before he woke did make sure he wasn't smelly and that there was no dirty or blood on him anymore.

The oily, mated hair was not salvageable though but Changkyun did offer him a black beanie that Jooheon accepts without thinking twice, not caring it would probably make it worse. He just needed to eat to get enough strength in him to be able to stand alone in the shower without risking slipping and bashing his head open.

He knew he read it somewhere that slipping in the shower was top on the list of accidental deaths around a household and his dizzy spells were making it more likely. Jooheon would've tried it anyway but Changkyun scoffed in his face, _"Only if you let me help, otherwise it's a no_ ," it went along those lines and Jooheon scoffed back, _"Now you're just trying to take advantage of me. I'm onto you, Hot Nurse_."

Changkyun arms were around his waist, helping him move around, mindful of the wound and gentle he guided Jooheon past the French doors that separated a cozy looking living room with huge brown sofas and a fluffy carpet and the well-lit and spacious kitchen.

From the door frame Jooheon could see a big oak table filled with food. And people. But so much food.

Hyunwoo sat comfortably at the head of the table, looking nothing like a dangerous business man but just like a lousy professor in sweats and square reading glasses. The newspaper lay folded in his lap as he nursed a cup of coffee to his lips, not giving a damn to the world.

Jooheon wants to say the image in front of him is foreign and startling but no, it just feels right, maybe that's how it was supposed to be. His boss looks like a cuddly and if slightly sleepy, bear, could be a trick of the light but Hyunwoo smiles invitingly at him to squash his doubts. "C'mon, sit down," he says "Let's put some solid food into you."

The boy with odd-eyes gets up and pushes a chair out. Staring into his face Jooheon comes to the realization that the person he looks like is Hyunwoo and he doesn't even gasp or feings surprise. "You're an idiot," he tells Hyunwoo who only smirks at him before going back to his newspaper.

He's the biggest idiot Jooheon has ever seen but he supposes Hyunwoo had a reason. To wait all these years even with all the manpower and connections he has, it must be because that was the only option he had.

It makes even more sense now. Uh, Hyunwoo's a father, who would've thought.

Jooheon’s ribs shift painfully and his stiches tug at his skin uncomfortably. Sitting in the chair and resting his dumb-numb legs is good tough and it makes Changkyun stop mother-hening him so much. The man sits by his side in a chair that belonged to Mako - Kihyun, who slapped him in the shoulder before giving up and sitting on the other side of the table.

Wonho looks superb with his cheeks full of food but he still has the decency of smiling and wiping the strawberry jam smear off of his chin. They both look... happy; Maybe for different reasons, but happy nonetheless.

Kihyun starts making a plate. "You need to eat," he puts a couple of pancakes in the milky-yellow plate, "but slowly and not a lot at once. You're going to get sick if you do."

Changkyun reaches for the plate and picks a few strawberries. He looks at Jooheon, who nods, " _syrup, please_ " says the silent excursion.

"I gave you plenty of liquid food and banana bags but," Kihyun seems to ponder, "nothing's better than this for you the get better faster, I suppose."

Jooheon feels grateful and he says so. Kihyun only shrugs. "It's not like I was going to let you die."

"Just take the freaking thank you, will you?"Minhyuk snaps from his side of the table. "He was all mother-hen on your ass," he chirps, reminiscent and humorous, "I don't know who was worse, your boyfriend or your doctor here."

"Shut up," Changkyun groans and Kihyun only sends a glare his way.

"Thank you for taking care of me," Jooheon says once more, for the whole table this time. They all just hum, embarrassed or not knowing what to say. Jooheon wouldn't either so he just focuses in his two fluffy and bronzed pancakes. He hates pancakes but just about knows he would eat a plank of wood and enjoy just as much as eating a fine-dining steak.

"Glad you're fine, kid," Sue tells him. He's looking fine and fresh, all clear eyed and moisturized skin.

Jooheon scoffs at the "kid." Hyungwon can't be much older than him. He puts in his priority list for when he gets better to do a background check on him to figure it out. "Jooheon," he simply states around a mouth full.

"Uh?"

"My name. Lee Jooheon."

The whole table looks at him. "Nice to meet you, Lee Jooheon.”

Hyungwon pronounces it correctly.

This part of the world had a blue tinge to it, tinted bright, the greens, the yellows, the reds and the pink, all saturated and dripping blue, like a shadow casted from the sky. even with heavy clouds hanging over them, thick curtains of a massive theater, the island was bright, tinkling, the green made his eyes lose focus and the blue made his heart beat two beats too slow.

He supposes he was feeling blue too.

Jooheon keeps thinks of Mrs. Chou in that noisy, grey neighborhood, alone, wonders if the sky is turning grey there too, if she somehow can feel him in the air, scent and warmth like he does. It's probably just nostalgia, the spots bleaching his past where he can't possibly remember how hard everything really was because now everything's tainted with how happy Changkyun made him, bleeding together.

Blue slaps against a wall of brown and an expanse of creamy yellow, all day, it's all a blur. Insistent, again and again, sloshes around petulantly by right, ever so calm against the chaos inside him. The quietness before the storm.

The ocean is so big and Jooheon takes comfort in knowing he is, in comparison, so small.

It's comforting because he's allowed to be. There's arms to fall into, no bars in the windows and no wonder of what tomorrow has in store for him.

It curls, the sounds of the waves hitting the wall of rocks. It curls like curling tongues and heavy accents. Shush, the air explodes damply between the cracks. Salty mist hits his face, one wave after the other, it imitates the rain that soon should be falling and a huge weight is lifted from the well that is his chest. A huge bucket filled with all the wish-coins he ever dropped, coming to the surface, being instead, put to rest in the bottom of the ocean.

The water hits his calves gently. He's never felt the ocean before. It urges him inside, not desperately but strongly and Jooheon thinks of sirens, past the coral reefs maybe. It's just refreshing enough to make the damp sweat in his skin feel less stick, his wound and the stiches to feel more healed.

A shell prickly stab at his feet, the wet sand runs between his toes. It's a shuddering feeling but he steps further, gasping when a wave hits his thighs, happy Changkyun made him wear running shorts.

It comes and goes, comes and goes. Jooheon can almost feel his body floating, white, sea foam. The sky cries loudly, wind whistling between the coconut trees and farther into the cracks of the yellow house, windows flapping, hinges groaning. He looks at it from where he stands, lively waiting for the whole structure to float too.

It's strong and solid but it's bright. It screams of lived-in space. On the veranda of the second floor Hyungwon lazily looks down at him, hands rubbing against his bare sternum, hair flopping around, black satin ribbons set loose. Jooheon likes him, finds him funny.

Hyungwon still pronounces his name with all the letters a week later when it's the two of them after Kihyun says it is okay for Jooheon to have a beer. Just one, Jooheon pouts, secretly happy.

"You were there," Jooheon isn't asking but simply stating. "That night, weren't you?"

The night their hotel room has blown out in loud noises, falling pieces and dark grey smoke; Jooheon toys with the scar from a shard of a champagne glass bottle that hit him in the knee. If he stays really quiet he can still hear the screams echoing somewhere close, a loop that repeats itself over and over again, like the waves in the ocean.

Hyungwon doesn't confirm or deny. Jooheon doesn't press, he just knows. Hyunwoo wasn't alone in hiding Changkyun from the world and Hyungwon, actually, is an old friend.

"Thank you." Apparently Jooheon was throwing those around lately.

"You're welcome, Jooheon."

The house doesn't float. Jooheon just might.

Changkyun chooses that moment to anchor him with heavy arms around his waist. Solid, bigger than the house, a shelter of tan skin that expands wide in Jooheon's sheets, under him, over him, breathing against him, his neck, his mouth, that one spot in his ribs, squirming, contracting, expanding, living.

A shelter of everything Changkyun; Of breathy, damp praise muffled against taut, firm skin and solid embrace when Jooheon shivers in the middle of the night for no reason.

"It's about to rain," he says with water up to his thighs too. They're about to be hit by a lightning.

Jooheon was baptized and named Matthew but when Changkyun kisses him and the first drop of sweet rain hits him in the cheek he's baptized for the second time, cold and clean.

"Kiss me," Jooheon begs.

They're two years apart. Changkyun's birth certificate says so, Jooheon doesn't know if it's the real one or one Changkyun put together after he grew up.

He thinks about that too sometimes, how Changkyun grew up half across the world orphan the same way he did. The cross tattoo he has in his ribs, if that has anything to do with growing up in a convent or for the thievery that got him recruited. Lying in bed Jooheon goes over them, fingers playing with the inked skin until he falls asleep.

Changkyun let him.

One night, tracing one of the eyes Changkyun has in his hip bones, "did you serve time?" Jooheon asks. He never asked before.

Changkyun hums, his chest vibrates. He doesn't stop playing with Jooheon's hair, his fingers skillfully running against the strands. There's a beat of silence.

"No," he says after a minute. He sounds choked, as if he doesn't know how to go about this, where to begin, "never needed to."

Jooheon liked Changkyun's tan skin, how it runs smooth under his fingers. He liked the ink too, even knowing he maybe shouldn't. Turns out he likes everything about Changkyun, even the parts the other man doesn't seem so sure about.

"I was recruited," Changkyun's accent curls around his ears, he sighs. "I pickpocketed the wallet of a _derzhatel obschaka_ ," he chuckles, remembering maybe.

"They found me an hour later with a loaf of bread under my arm and a bottle of milk on the other. I hadn't eaten in days."

Cold settle in Jooheon's bones, an old friend, even if their bodies together are like a furnace. Before Mrs. Chou he was often akin of having to go to sleep with his stomach hurting, it brings him memories too. He props his chin against Changkyun's naked chest, kisses there and looks at him, making sure he's okay.

He smiles at him and Jooheon sets back, ears resting just above where his heart beats lazily, tired after all their rolling around.

Jooheon's fingers keep toying with Changkyun's hip bones.

"They found it amusing," Jooheon can imagine it. "I was feisty, the bookkeeper liked me, instead of cutting my hands off he decided I was going to pay him back."

"Thank God," Jooheon sings, trying to close the door of _ptsd_ infested dreams. "I like your fingers," he kisses his chest once more. "I like your hands."

Changkyun laughs, breathy, he feigns offence, "just my fingers?"

"Yep," the _p_ pops in Jooheon's mouth, he's smiling sheepish. "They sting."

A full belly laugh erupts from Changkyun guts and the world swings around Jooheon. For a moment his dizzy and in the other he's looking at two, bottomless amber pits. There's so much in there it's breathtaking, he's never going to get tired of it, looking at Changkyun's eyes, seeing how they light up, tiny sparkles, shiny and bright like this whole place.

They smile fondly at each other.

"You like that, uh?" It's not really a question and when Changkyun kisses him Jooheon hums, contently..

He does. He likes how his fingers sting when they, without mercy, leave pink imprints on his skin, marking him up, leaving tiny little mementos scattered around his body. something to press up against throughout the day, real, not just a memory or a phantom feeling, it's not just in his head. Changkyun may never disappear again he prays digging where it hurts. "I like all of you."

Changkyun kisses him again. "I know," like a believer he whispers.

They settle against each other, just breathing in sync. Somewhere outside someone laughs loudly, probably Minhyuk, the house is full, a glass breaks, a door slams against the wall, a bird sings just outside their window. Peppering kisses on exposed skin.

"What does it mean?" Jooheon asks after kissing the inked band Changkyun has in his ring finger. He wants to catalogue them someday.

"You," it slips easily from his tongue. "I’m yours."

"Yeah?" Jooheon squirms until he's on top of him again, thighs squeezing, straddling Changkyun's lap, there's a shadow dancing in his face, a boy with his whole hand in the cookie jar, unsupervised.

 _He's trouble_ , Changkyun thinks the same way he thought when he first saw him.

“How come you don't have a cat tattooed?" Jooheon might have an obsession with Changkyun's hip bones. The eyes tattooed in there, one in each, stares back at him as he pokes around it.

"No cat," shaking his head Changkyun reaches his hand to rest on Jooheon's thigh, warm. "They thought a wolf was more fitting."

It is.

"What about this one?" his fingers trace the eye that at any moment might wink at him.

Instead of answering Changkyun asks "How come you never got one?" and Jooheon shrugs, he's not really sure.

"Should I?"

“Do you want one?"

Maybe, maybe Jooheon does want one, a band in his ring finger like the one Changkyun has. Their fingers lock together, where one ends the other begins.

They mix together, not like pieces of a puzzle but two halfs of the same coin. It's oddly poetic when Changkyun brings their knuckles to his lips and seals it with a kiss, a ceremony without a church.

Some mornings Jooheon still wakes up in a fit, chest heaving, sealed wound itching, a fret thought passing through his mind, fear of finding the other half of the bed empty paralyzes him. He breathes and breathes and breathes until Changkyun's arms bring him back down " _go back to sleep_."

Changkyun is always there. His clothes are in the closet, his cellphone resting in the bidet, his cologne floating in the air mixed with Jooheon’s lotion. In those mornings Jooheon's tongue itches to say it back.

Instead, he says there and then, "How about I get one that matches yours?"

Changkyun's eyes go wide and round, his throat gulps around nothing, "which one?"

Jooheon brings their crossed hands to his own lips. Kisses in the same place Changkyun did and then undo them. He kisses each digital, leans into the touch when Changkyun's thumb rubs his fat bottom lip, brings the tip inside his mouth, leaps at it with his tongue, like a cat. Changkyun's palms are warm, he kisses there too and around his ring finger.

“This one?" He asks, picking from a personal portfolio.

"Really?" Changkyun’s earthquake under the surface, trembling, waiting while shaking, suppressed raw electric power, uncapped live wire. He buzzes. every bone in his body ready to snap if he just misinterpreted.

it's on the tip of Jooheon's tongue, slippery.

"Hm," he vibrates, purring. "Say it, again please," begging.

"what?" Changkyun grabs his waist, a life line, dig his fingers in the meat in there, takes advantage of a Jooheon free of wounds, knuckles turning white the skin under, pink. “That I'm yours?"

Jooheon nods, bleary eyed. The snake of heat in his guys uncoils, hisses, travels all the way up and down, he can't help but clench. A beast between his thighs, one he doesn't want to let go of.

_"I'm yours, Jooheon."_

It sounds the same like the first time, Jooheon shivers, he's on fire.

Changkyun is spinning them again and Jooheon would happily play this like a game for the rest of his life. Would open his legs wider and wider to accommodate the other, lock his ankles behind his back to never let him go, breath being punched out of him and all. His raven bangs fall to his eyes, Jooheon pushes them back and it feels like silk. "I'll always be," he whispers.

"Make me yours, then" Jooheon whispers back against soft lips, already belonging.

**Author's Note:**

> bye bye, wear a mask an stay safe!


End file.
